In conjunction w/ that, the person might want to get all distinct mispelled states and update them at once. If his DB is big, say 6mil rows, it'd be 6mil selects, and 1 update for every misspelled row, vs 1 select on a 6 million row table and 1 update for each misspelling.

Maybe the person already does this, but might as well be obvious :)
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