This operator is part of the RANK operator implementation. It adds a local counter and a unique task id to each tuple. There are 2 modes of operations: regular and dense. The local counter is depends on the mode of operation. With regular rank is considered duplicate rows while assigning numbers to distinct values groups. With dense rank counts the number of distinct values, without considering duplicate rows. Depending on if it is considered. the entire tuple (row number) or a by a set of columns (rank by). This Physical Operator relies on some specific MR class, available at PigMapReduceCounter.
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