Thanks for the response. In the situation I faced last week where I was updating contacts, about 2,000, on a local version of the database this took 1 second, on the live version, it completed in just over 1 min, causing a deadlock and timeouts for a few people!

I was curious as to whether the row by row would have been better because (I presume the problem was cause becasuse someone was trying to update a contact I had in my batc) as it would have looked at a contact one at a time?

Not sure if I'm explaining myself that well, hopefully the above makes sense.