CASE vs Multiple UPDATE queries for large data sets - Performance

Question

For performance what option would be better for large data sets that are to be updated?

Using a CASE statement or Individual update queries?

CASE Example:

UPDATE tbl_name SET field_name = 
CASE
    WHEN condition_1 THEN 'Blah'
    WHEN condition_2 THEN 'Foo'
    WHEN condition_x THEN 123
    ELSE 'bar'
END AS value

Individual Query Example:

UPDATE tbl_name SET field_name = 'Blah' WHERE field_name = condition_1
UPDATE tbl_name SET field_name = 'Foo' WHERE field_name = condition_2
UPDATE tbl_name SET field_name = 123 WHERE field_name = condition_x
UPDATE tbl_name SET field_name = 'bar' WHERE field_name = condition_y

NOTE: About 300,000 records are going to be updated and the CASE statement would have about 10,000 WHEN conditions. If using the individual queries it's about 10,000 as well

Solution

The CASE version.

This is because there is a good chance you are altering the same row more than once with the individual statements. If row 10 has both condition_1 and condition_y then it will need to get read and altered twice. If you have a clustered index this means two clustered index updates on top of whatever the other field(s) that were modified were.

If you can do it as a single statement, each row will be read only once and it should run much quicker.

I changed a similar process about a year ago that used dozens of UPDATE statements in sequence to use a since UPDATE with CASE and processing time dropped about 80%.