Thanks for your reply Peter,

  BTW I wonder if it is a coincidence that the 3 best programmers in the
New World are named Peter?

PF> Since you can never assume anything about the sequence of an SQL
result PF> set....

Why is that?  I since I am including the clause :

        order by process_date desc

Why may I not assume that they are in descending sequence?  Or do you mean
one can not determine anything about the RIDS given the sequence of the
results set?  I assume you mean the latter, and you are quite right.  (Well
using RIDS was just a guess.  :-)  But this really does not seem to be
solvable other than using a cursor loop, or adding an update statement. 
I.e. Mr. Noon is most liklely correct in stateing this cannot be done in a
single statement since SQL is a relational, not relativistic system. 
Thanks very much for your help now and as in the past!

Sincerely

Peter

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