When you need to update 50000000 records. Set a flag or whatever.
Try doing this using an ORM without calling a stored procedure or native SQL commands..
Update 1 : Try also retrieving one record with only a few of its fields. (When you have a very "wide" table). Or a scalar result. ORMs suck at this too.
UPDATE 2 : It seems that EF 5.0 beta promises batch updates but this is very hot news (2012, January)
