Starting Transaction.

Executing SQL Command:
INSERT INTO [scratch] (text_field, integer_field, date_time_field) VALUES ('Thursday', '8', '1/8/2009 8:05:52 AM');

Records Affected: 1

Commiting Transaction.

Run the script again: Commit Transaction or Rollback Transaction

Ensuring data integrity is an important consideration when building an application. The data in your database is most likely valuable to your business and steps need to be taken to ensure that changes made to it are executed correctly. This is where transactions come into play.

Transactions are used to ensure that either all or none of the steps involved in an operation are executed. Accounting is a perfect example of why transactions are important. It's often necessary to transfer money from one account to another. In order to do this you need to first debit money from the source account and then credit it to the destination account. Without transactions, if something went wrong while processing the request, we might be left in a situation where the money had already been removed from the source account and not yet credited to the destination. The resulting confusion over the missing money could cause real problems.

Continuing the same example, by placing both the debit and credit operations into a single transaction we ensure that the funds either move to the new account or they do not. In this example, using a transaction eliminates the possibility of "creating" or "destroying" money. If the funds didn't get transferred then we still need to determine the source of the error and fix it, but at least we don't have to try and track down the missing money as well.

By default this page will execute CommitTrans in order to commit the transaction to the database. If you would like to run the script again you can choose whether or not it will commit (CommitTrans) or rollback (RollbackTrans) the transaction by clicking the corresponding links above.

Please note that clicking the above links will run the script again and either commit or rollback the insertion of a new record. It will not affect any records already added to the database including the one shown above which was already processed.

You should also note that I'm not really doing much of anything in the transaction that would require a transaction. I'm doing a simple insert so that you can see that the data does get inserted when the transaction is committed and doesn't get inserted when it is rolled back. In the real world, you'd most likely have at least two operations going on inside the transaction, but I'm just including one in order to keep things as simple as possible.

You can view any data that was committed to the database via our Simple Database sample. It's probably easiest if you use the value of the date_time_field (shown in the SQL statement above) to locate the appropriate record.