Disclaimer: I've worked with and submitted a few odd patches to Hive. I have not worked with Pig directly. I think you ought to consider what you mean by infer

Disclaimer: I've worked with and submitted a few odd patches to Hive. I have not worked with Pig directly. I think you ought to consider what you mean by inferior here carefully. If you mean 'Hive QL can capture many of the common semantics of SQL' then sure. If you mean just about anything else, you're wrong. The performance and reliability considerations of Hive/Hadoop are vastly different and very easily inferior to a mysql or postgres setup for small to mid-size datasets. (That doesn't even get into ease-of-usage. Anyone who's ever dealt with Hive's dreaded 'error: return code: -9' can attest to how maddening Hive can be to use).