Record Limit for Using Transactions, Commit?

[Guest]

Is there practical limit for using Begin Trans, Commit on a PC with modest
RAM (e.g., 128MB)? I am updating 400,000 records and in each looping through
a list of special characters in each record to replace them. This whole
update process is batched. I could have done this w/o transactions and just
used SQL to update each record.

Thanks

 

[Allen Browne]

AFAIK, the limitations are the 2gb file size, and the available disk space
for the large temp file that may be generated.

An single update query will almost certainly be more efficient than looping
through 400k records if the update can be done that way.