When should I use a SQLTransaction

Question

What is the appropriate time to use a SQLTransaction?

I use them for all of my INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE statements.

Is this the correct usage or am I doing a bit of overkill?

Answer 1

Use a transaction when you want a series of statements to be treated atomically - that is either they all succeed and are committed, or they are all rolled back.

Since simple statements are already atomic you don't need to explicitly create a transaction around each and every individual statement.

Answer 2

You only need a transaction if you plan to do multiple statements, and plan to rollback all of the data changes that resulted from the statements if an error somewhere down the line occurs. Wrapping single update/delete statements is not needed. If an error occurs with a single command, simply catch and handle the error in your front-end code.

Answer 3

If your commands are only single issued, and not a group, then it is probably overkill. Transactions are used to group sql commands together, a group that must have all members succeed, or none at all.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomicity_%28database_systems%29