orting a table by the last_name from another table

[danielkessler]

Relax, all questions are proper...

I'm sorry, but it's morning and I didn't state that well.

What I meant is that I have little experience working with datasets from related tables and often, I don't know what can and cannot be done. So, I don't know if I'm asking something that's clearly not doable or shouldn't be done by the DB.

What tells you in your data structure which one is the first author?

It's the order that they were entered, so it's the UID publicationa_id

There is nothing wrong with it, try something like...

select a_fname || ',' a_lname
from publications_authors
where rownum < 2;

... just to test it.

That works, but doesn't bring in a_lname because there's not a pipe after the comma - but the comma does the right thing.
I had a double pipe: a_fname || ',' || a_lname and that works with a colon in between, but not with a comma. I receive the error:
[Table (rows 8 columns A_FNAME||','||A_LNAME): [A_FNAME||','||A_LNAME: coldfusion.sql.QueryColumn@429784] ] is not indexable by A_FNAME||'