What's the difference between begin transaction vs. begin work

Question

I saw in SQL Server about the transaction part it has following statements:

• begin transaction or begin work
• commit transaction or commit work
• rollback transaction or commit work

I used transaction set statements in my work, but why there are work statements here? Are they same? If not, what the difference between them?

Answer 1

• According to Microsoft's SQL Server documentation, there is no support for BEGIN WORK, instead use BEGIN TRANSACTION (which also supports named transactions).
  • The token BEGIN (by itself) denotes a statement-block and is completely unrelated to transactions.
• Curiously, while SQL Server does not support BEGIN WORK, SQL Server does support COMMIT WORK and ROLLBACK WORK.
  • COMMIT WORK has identical semantics to COMMIT TRANSACTION.
  • ROLLBACK WORK has identical semantics to ROLLBACK TRANSACTION.
• Also curiously, [the ISO SQL-2016][6] grammar uses START TRANSACTION with COMMIT WORK and ROLLBACK WORK which is a strangely inconsistent use of language keywords.
  • SQL Server 2017+ and Azure SQL does seem to support START WORK though SSMS does not recognize the syntax.

ISO SQL (2016) vs T-SQL (MS SQL Server)

	ISO SQL	T-SQL (SQL Server)	Effect on @@TRANCOUNT
Transactions
Begin a transaction	START TRANSACTION	BEGIN TRANSACTION	+ 1
Commit a transaction	COMMIT WORK	COMMIT TRANSACTION	- 1
Rollback a transaction	ROLLBACK WORK	ROLLBACK TRANSACTION	= 0
Savepoints
Create a savepoint	SAVEPOINT	SAVE TRANSACTION	(No effect)
Release a savepoint	RELEASE SAVEPOINT	(Not supported)	(No effect)
Rollback to savepoint	ROLLBACK WORK TO SAVEPOINT	ROLLBACK TRANSACTION	(No effect)

Syntax Support in SQL Server 2016 and later, and Azure SQL

• NOTE: This does not necessarily include Azure Synapse, SQL Server Parallel Data Warehouse, and Analytics Platform System.

T-SQL Syntax	Semantics
Similar and Ambiguous syntax:	These commands are easily confused for TRANSACTION control statements, but in SQL Server are completely unrelated to TRANSACTIONS.
BEGIN	BEGIN, by itself, without any following TRAN or TRANSACTION keyword, denotes a statement block terminated by END.
START	Undocumented, but recognized by SSMS, curiously.
Start a transaction:
BEGIN WORK	Not supported by SQL Server
START WORK	Not supported by SQL Server
START TRANSACTION	Not supported by SQL Server
BEGIN TRAN	Identical to BEGIN TRANSACTION
BEGIN TRAN <transaction_name>	Identical to BEGIN TRANSACTION <transaction_name>. transaction_name can also be a @variable containing the transaction name. Named transactions are mostly used with nested transactions, but committing an inner transaction is a NOOP and only the outermost transaction can be used with ROLLBACK
BEGIN TRANSACTION	Starts an unnamed transaction.
BEGIN TRANSACTION <transaction_name>	transaction_name can also be a @variable containing the transaction name.
Commit a transaction
COMMIT	Identical to COMMIT TRANSACTION
COMMIT WORK	Identical to COMMIT TRANSACTION. ISO SQL compliant.
COMMIT TRAN	Identical to COMMIT TRANSACTION
COMMIT TRAN <transaction_name>	Identical to COMMIT TRANSACTION <transaction_name>. transaction_name can also be a @variable containing the transaction name.
COMMIT TRANSACTION	Commits an unnamed transaction started with BEGIN TRANSACTION. Cannot be used to create a savepoint (use SAVE TRANSACTION for that).
COMMIT TRANSACTION <transaction_name>	Commits a named transaction started with BEGIN TRANSACTION <transaction_name>. Cannot be used to create a savepoint (use SAVE TRANSACTION <savepoint_name> for that). Committing a nested transaction is a no-op in SQL Server: inner/nested changes are only committed when the outermost transaction is committed.
Rollback a transaction
ROLLBACK	Identical to ROLLBACK TRANSACTION.
ROLLBACK WORK	Identical to ROLLBACK TRANSACTION. ISO SQL compliant.
ROLLBACK TRAN	Identical to ROLLBACK TRANSACTION.
ROLLBACK TRAN <transaction_name>	Identical to ROLLBACK TRANSACTION <transaction_name>. transaction_name can also be a @variable containing the transaction name.
ROLLBACK TRAN <savepoint_name>	Identical to ROLLBACK TRANSACTION <savepoint_name>. savepoint_name can also be a @variable containing the savepoint name.
ROLLBACK TRANSACTION	Rolls back the current explicit or implicit transaction.
ROLLBACK TRANSACTION <transaction_name>	Rolls back a named transaction. transaction_name must be the outermost transaction's name when working with nested transactions.
ROLLBACK TRANSACTION <savepoint_name>	savepoint_name must have been previously created with SAVE TRANSACTION <savepoint_name> (this is how the ROLLBACK TRANSACTION command for transactions vs. savepoints is disambiguated).