Hi Tom,

I can offer you some ideas:
- Run UPDATE below 5 times and return 5 PK's
- Add one more filed to the table and stamp it with session id and then select records with that id. Something like

UPDATE inbox
  SET state = 'PROCESSING', stamp = @@SPID
  WHERE pk IN
      ( SELECT TOP 5 pk FROM inbox
  WHERE state = 'QUEUED')

SELECT pk FROM inbox 
  WHERE stamp = @@SPID AND state = 'PROCESSING'

>Sergey, I thought you might be the one to reply to this - thanks!
>
>Originally we were going to extract the TOP 5 rows. How would you
>handle that situation should we decide to go that route?
>
>>You can do this with one UPDATE command

DECLARE @pk uniqueidentifier
>>UPDATE inbox
>>  SET @pk = pk, state = 'PROCESSING'
>>  WHERE pk IN
>>      ( SELECT TOP 1 pk   FROM inbox
>>  WHERE state = 'QUEUED')
>>
>>SELECT @pk

>>
>>>The code below the line is intended to find the next 'Queued' row in an SQL Server 2000 inbox table, change its status to 'Processing' and then return the primary key to a Visual FoxPro application.
>>>
>>>
>>< snip >