Fixed it 🙂   It seems that the Cloudera deployment of the Piggybank.jar does not containt the xpath functionality (or any xml functionality at all). See: http://grepcode.com/project/repository.cloudera.com/content/repositories/releases/org.apache.pig/piggybank   I downloaded piggybank.jar 0.15.0 from https://mvnrepository.com/artifact/org.apache.pig/piggybank/0.15.0 put it in /home/ubuntu and used it in my script.     REGISTER /home/ubuntu/piggybank-0.15.0.jar A = LOAD '/MyPath/Example.xml' using org.apache.pig.piggybank.storage.XMLLoader('RootNode') as (xmlContents:chararray); B= FOREACH A GENERATE org.apache.pig.piggybank.evaluation.xml.XPath(xmlContents, 'MyXpathQuery'); STORE B INTO 'Output/B' USING PigStorage(); Now everything works fine! 🙂     ... View more