Far as I know, any isolated statement (select, insert, etc) is automatically surrounded by BEGIN/COMMIT unless you've already opened an explicit BEGIN. My app has a couple of hundred usually isolated statements to update this or that part of some db or other. If I had to BEGIN/COMMIT each of these life would be rather tedious. I also have a couple of places where I know I'll be doing a lot of inserts, so I do all those inside a transaction, for speed. That clear?