Transaction must be atomic (it is one unit of work and does not dependent on previous and following transactions), consistent (data is either committed or roll back, no Ò€œin-betweenÒ€ case where Ò€¦ There is an update query in progress, the transaction is started at a higher level on the connection. In order to ensure that all server data is in a valid state for the update, i need to do a couple reads.

I have no control over the way this is executed. Because a transaction is held open for the full duration, whe Begin transaction / commit extends this locking functionality to the work done by multiple statements, but it adds nothing to single statements. However, the database transaction log is Ò€¦