>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?

I am not sure if I can help you for you are not giving much details, but I can tell you my experience with some big updates I had. The background is a process that creates very compact binary files that I needed to parse and store in SQL, each file has 2 million records and we get a new one every half an hour, the first version of the program parsed the binary file record by record and inserted the records into the SQL database, but it would take the process more than half an hour, making it of course nonviable as it would fall behind, I found out that the parsing was very very fast, but the bottle neck was the inserts, so I changed the program to use SQL Bulk Copy (System.Data.SqlClient.SqlBulkCopy) and the whole process takes about a minute. HTH