Thank you (and all the other folks) for the answers. From my application's perspective, that's the case, as a read transaction starts (that's guaranteed by the go channel semantics) only after a commit has been performed, but I confess I'll have to debug it to figure out whether that's done correctly. I noticed that the Go database wrappers are quite "thick", with many layers from the users till the calls to the database itself, and I'll try to understand better how it decides to start and commit a transaction (apart from the explicit "BEGIN" and "COMMIT).