Hi. This is expectable. Many order-by queries may actually require the
DBMS to copy the table data to a temporary area to sort, and so the
actual table data is not even returned to the client, but is returned
from that temp copy. It is typically a complicated idea to ask the DBMS
to trace the row from the client to the copy and then back to the original
table row, and they typically don't do it. In fact some DBMSes free the
temp memory holding the sorted data as soon as it is returned to the
client. I suggest you make a separate update statement to change a row,
and use it whenever you find a row in the query that you want to change.
Getting updateable result sets is typically inefficient.
Joe Weinstein at BEA