(The original version of this post first appeared on the now-deleted SentryOne blog at the start of 2022.)
One of the most fundamental concepts in any relational database management system (RDBMS), such as SQL Server, is the transaction. During my consulting career, I’ve seen many instances of performance problems caused by developers not understanding how transactions work in SQL Server, so in this tutorial, I’ll explain what transactions are and why they’re necessary, plus some details of how they work in SQL Server. There are nuances to some of this when Accelerated Database Recovery (ADR) is in use – topics