Apache Pig is a Hadoop platform that simplifies the creation of MapReduce jobs using a high-level, SQL-like language called Pig Latin. It allows for processing both structured and unstructured data, offering an interactive shell called Grunt for executing Pig Latin scripts, as well as methods for data loading, filtering, grouping, and user-defined functions. The document outlines the various types of functions in Pig Latin and provides an example of a user-defined filter function.