Honestly, I wouldn't have suggested it if I hadn't checked. There is no need to use the ids as we want to update the author sort associated with an authors name.
The rough steps are:
Export the 'authors' table to a file.
Edit the file to produce update statements. Each would look like:
Code:
UPDATE authors SET sort = '<sort value from file>' WHERE name = '<name value from file>';
Run each of these statements on the other database. If the author exists, it gets updated. If it doesn't, nothing will happen.
I don't really suggest it, as it needs to be redone as you add books with new authors the libraries. But, as a one off to clean up past crimes, it would work. And if course, anyone who did this, would need to make sure they knew what they were doing and had a good backup.