Introduction
In the world of SQL Server performance troubleshooting, developers and DBAs often chase the usual suspects: bad indexes, poorly written queries, outdated statistics, or parameter sniffing. These are the headline-grabbers that fill blog posts and conference talks. But lurking beneath the surface is another silent killer — one that doesn’t show up in execution plans, that doesn’t leave obvious fingerprints in the code, and that quietly sabotages concurrency: implicit transactions.
Unlike explicit transactions, where the developer deliberately issues a BEGIN TRAN and follows it with a COMMIT or ROLLBACK, implicit transactions begin automatically the moment you run a statement.