Question

I have been trying to find info on the web about the differences between these statements, and it seems to me they are identical but I can’t find confirmation of that or any kind of comparison between the two.

What is the difference between doing this:

BEGIN
    -- Some update, insert, set statements
END

and doing this

BEGIN TRANS
    -- Some update, insert, set statements
COMMIT TRANS

?

Note that there is only the need to rollback in the case of some exception or timeout or other general failure, there would not be a conditional reason to rollback.

Answer 1

BEGIN and END deal with code blocks. They are similar to the curly braces you see in many languages:

if (somethingIsTrue)
{ // like BEGIN
    // do something here
} // like END

In SQL, this is:

if somethingIsTrue
BEGIN
    -- do something here
END

BEGIN TRAN, COMMIT, and ROLLBACK begin and end transactions. They do not specify a new block of code; they only mark the transaction boundaries.

Note that you can write a BEGIN TRAN and COMMIT in separate blocks of code. For example, if you want code to be part of a transaction, but you don’t want to start a new one if the code is already in a transaction, you can do something like this:

declare @TranStarted bit = 0
if @@trancount = 0
begin
    set @TranStarted = 1
    begin tran
end

-- ... do work ...

if @TranStarted = 1
begin
    commit
    set @TranStarted = 0
end