Philippe de Cuzey introduces Spark to people already familiar with Pig:
I like to think of Pig as a high-level Map/Reduce commands pipeline. As a former SQL programmer, I find it quite intuitive, and at my organization our Hadoop jobs are still mostly developed in Pig.
Pig has a lot of qualities: it is stable, scales very well, and integrates natively with the Hive metastore HCatalog. By describing each step atomically, it minimizes conceptual bugs that you often find in complicated SQL code.
But sometimes, Pig has some limitations that makes it a poor programming paradigm to fit your needs.
Philippe includes a couple of examples in Pig, PySpark, and SparkSQL. Even if you aren’t familiar with Pig, this is a good article to help familiarize yourself with Spark.