Hi, > I have written my custom partitioner for partitioning datasets. I want  to > partition two datasets using the same partitioner and then in the  next > mapreduce job, I want each mapper to handle the same partition from  the two > sources and perform some function such as joining etc. How I  can I ensure that > one mapper gets the split that corresponds to same  partition from both the > sources? > Not really an answer to your specific question, but have you taken a look at Pig (http://hadoop.apache.org/pig) which is suitable for operations like Joining data sets ?