It's both reasons that it's faster.  To pretend that the shared locks on rows don't take any time is just not true.  It may be small overhead, but...

Great, glad it helped.

Btw, note that you must ALWAYS use the alias in the UPDATE statement when using a join in an UPDATE.

--WRONG!!

UPDATE Brs --<<--WRONG!! MUST be (alias) B

SET HrsHKB...

READUNCOMMITTED and NOLOCK cannot be specified for tables modified by insert, update, or delete operations. The SQL Server query optimizer ignores the READUNCOMMITTED...

Thanks all.

Yeah, normally I too try to avoid loops, but in this case, it's probably better just to loop.

For absolute max efficiency, you can uncomment the UPDATE #bundles statement, although...

Yes, it works, it's easy enough to write code to prove it:

;with tbltest as (select cast('ab012' as varchar(5)) as TestNumber) select * from tblTest where TestNumber = cast(20012 as varchar(5))

Just...

READUNCOMMITTED and NOLOCK cannot be specified for tables modified by insert, update, or delete operations. The SQL Server query optimizer ignores the READUNCOMMITTED and NOLOCK...

But...

The biggest...

READUNCOMMITTED and NOLOCK cannot be specified for tables modified by insert, update, or delete operations. The SQL Server query optimizer ignores the READUNCOMMITTED and NOLOCK hints...

NOLOCK is NOT a bad thing when used properly, i.e., dirty reads are acceptable for that query (or you know that dirty reads aren't going to recur).  There has been...

I'd forget recursion for this for now, maybe try a more "loopy" approach:

USE tempdb;

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS dbo.objectLinks;

CREATE TABLE dbo.objectLinks (
   UniqueID int IDENTITY(1,1) NOT...

I don't see a more efficient way.  The speed problem may be that it ise UPDATEing every row of the Brs table, since there's no join to it in the...

I thought LEAD / LAG were added in SQL 2012?!, although I'm not sure how useful they'd be here anyway.

DROP TABLE IF EXISTS #testdata;

CREATE TABLE #testdata ( description nvarchar(max) NULL, new_description nvarchar(max) NULL );
INSERT INTO #testdata ( description) VALUES 
    ('Hyperlink[https://OldURL/Site/location.doc?andnowuneededstuff]'),
  ...

Not 100% sure what you are ultimately trying to do, but maybe something like this:

...

SET DESCRIPTION = REPLACE(CAST(DESCRIPTION AS nvarchar(max)), N'.doc?', N'?web=1')

...

It's vital to insure that these backups are securely encrypted.  Highly sensitive data going to a removal drive would be a very bad practice otherwise.