You said it seems that there was something triggering a save. That's because there was a change to the curosr.
In the old days, pre-SQL, we often would create a cursor and, maybe in the refresh form method, write the result of a calculation into the cursor. The calculation was just for display, it was not a column in the table.
However, that's sufficient to trigger a save. When we were using DBFs the calculated field was ignored and no harm was done. But, in SQL, stuff happens before the engine realizes that it doesn't need to save that calculated column.