Long update progress

We have an database batch update process running. It runs normally and takes
around 6 hours. This is dealing with a much larger data set after an error
correction. It's been running for 6 days now and people are getting twitchy
that it might not finish. Is there any way (accepting that more preparation
would, in retrospect, have been better) to tell how far we're got. This
iterates round a cursor and updates individual rows. The trouble is it
commits once at the end.

The ideal would be to find a way of doing a dirty read against the table
that is bing updated. Then we'd know how many rows had been processed.

Any ideas?

Cheers

Andy