You can issue update dml after call to processTask method. Only thing you need to be careful is
you should NOT read the status flag from resultset (rs) as the value will be dirty. The more cleaner way will be to select 20/n record at a time and copy into a DTO/VO collection, iterate the collection, process and update the status flag. This way you can release the connection and also don't worry about reading dirty value.
In the update DML you can filter by task and status so that you update the status only if it's still in 'issued' status.
[ February 15, 2007: Message edited by: Purushothaman Thambu ]