title: Run SQL statements asynchronously
body: <p>I have six SQL UPDATE statements (on the same database) as an SQL Agent job that I run every night to ensure that two systems are in sync with each other.  Each update takes about 10 minutes to run.</p>
  
  <p>As a test today I opened SQL Studio Manager and opened five windows and ran the five updates concurrently (I can guarantee that a row can only ever be updated by one SQL statement).  The five queries ran in 15 minutes.</p>
  
  <p>Therefore instead of using a single SQL Agent Job I am thinking about calling the SQL statements from a VB.NET program, so that I can either:</p>
  
  <p>1) Use asynchronous calls to ensure the queries are running concurrently.
  2) Use multiple threads to ensure the queries are running concurrently</p>
  
  <p>I read an article recently that says that asynchronous calls should not be used to speed up processing performance.  Therefore I believe that multiple threads is the answer.  Is that correct?</p>