The describe operator is used to view the schema of a relation.
The syntax of the describe operator is as follows −
grunt> Describe Relation_name
Assume we have a file student_data.txt in HDFS with the following content.
001,Rajiv,Reddy,9848022337,Hyderabad 002,siddarth,Battacharya,9848022338,Kolkata 003,Rajesh,Khanna,9848022339,Delhi 004,Preethi,Agarwal,9848022330,Pune 005,Trupthi,Mohanthy,9848022336,Bhuwaneshwar 006,Archana,Mishra,9848022335,Chennai.
And we have read it into a relation student using the LOAD operator as shown below.
grunt> student = LOAD 'hdfs://localhost:9000/pig_data/student_data.txt' USING PigStorage(',') as ( id:int, firstname:chararray, lastname:chararray, phone:chararray, city:chararray );
Now, let us describe the relation named student and verify the schema as shown below.
grunt> describe student;
Once you execute the above Pig Latin statement, it will produce the following output.
grunt> student: { id: int,firstname: chararray,lastname: chararray,phone: chararray,city: chararray }