It is Hadoop MapReduce shuffle\'s default behavior to sort the shuffle key within partition, but not cross partitions(It is the total ordering that makes keys sorted cross t
I've never had this need before, but my first guess would be to use any of the *Partition* methods (e.g. foreachPartition or mapPartitions) to do the sorting within every partition.
Since they give you a Scala Iterator, you could use it.toSeq and then apply any of the sorting methods of Seq, e.g. sortBy or sortWith or sorted.