Can I Select and Update at the same time?

Question

This is an over-simplified explanation of what I\'m working on.
I have a table with status column. Multiple instances of the application will pull the contents of the f

Answer 1

Yes, and maybe use the rowlock hint to keep it isolated from the other threads, eg.

UPDATE
Jobs WITH (ROWLOCK, UPDLOCK, READPAST)
SET Status = 'WORKING'
WHERE JobID =
(SELECT Top 1 JobId FROM Jobs WHERE Status = 'NEW')

EDIT: Rowlock would be better as suggested by Quassnoi, but the same idea applies to do the update in one query.