Guru's Guide to SQL Server Architecture and Internals, The

Automatic Transaction Management

SQL Server provides a number of facilities for automating transaction management. The most prominent example of these is the automatic transaction (auto-commit) facility. As mentioned earlier, an automatic transaction is begun and committed or rolled back implicitly by the server. There's no need for explicit BEGIN TRAN or COMMIT/ROLLBACK TRAN statements. The server initiates a transaction when a modification command begins and, depending on the command's success, commits or rolls it back afterward. Automatic transaction mode is SQL Server's default mode but is disabled when implicit or user-defined transactions are enabled.

Implicit transactions offer another type of automated transaction management. Whenever ...