>I have a program which runs for hours to update thousands of records. The program runs in a loop updating records one by one. As is the case for an insert command, is there any special syntax which would allow us to update multiple records in one command, saving precious time in the process?

Can you do a batch update updating 10K rows in a time? If each update is different. you can place the update of 10K rows into begin transaction / commit transaction to run it as a batch.