Seems to me there is a fundamental flaw in the process, the web services should be your bottleneck but for a database to only be updating 30k records an hour seems ludicrous. If the cursor/loop is the problem then look a little further afield. Can you construct an xml dataset on the UI end and pass in a bulk set of updates. How about doing a bunch of bulk inserts into another table and then using a proc to do the updates to your transaction table. Target tables could be created for each instance and truncated after the update. Or cycle through 2 target tables per instance. Never underestimate the power of human stupidity RAH