Map-Reduce-Merge for Join Operation

In this SIGMOD 2007 paper: Map-reduce-merge: simplified relational data processing on large clusters, the authors add to Map-Reduce a Merge phase that can efficiently merge data already partitioned and sorted (or hashed) by map and reduce modules, and demonstrate that this new model can express relational algebra operators as well as implement several join algorithms.

However, I think the newly added merge stage could be implemented using another MapReduce job -- the mapper scans over key-value pairs of all lineage and output them identically; the shuffling stage will merge values of different lineage but the same key into reduce inputs; finally, the reducer can do whatever supposed to be done by merger.

Other people told me that there are more ways to do merge using MapReduce model. But above simple solution seems one of the most scalable. In short, if I am going to implement a parallel programming model given the objective to support joining of relational data, I would just implement MapReduce, rather than MapReduce-Merge.