Executing an SQLCommand without specifying a Transaction

Question

We have some lists of data being fetched in our application via a SqlCommand performing a `SELECT` query on a SQL Server database. We do not explicitly setup a transaction on the SqlCommand, instead just passing it a SqlConnection and running it. Is it the case that when no transaction is specified that SQL Server will initiate and use a default transaction with the default IsolationLevel of `ReadCommitted`?

Accepted Answer

SQL Server can work happily without an explicit transaction. But yes, I believe it is essentially read-committed (unless, of course, you add extra hints to your query objects,such as `UPDLOCK` / `NOLOCK`). You can investigate this with:

```
DBCC USEROPTIONS
```

which shows (among others):

```
isolation level read committed
```

Executing an SQLCommand without specifying a Transaction

Solution

Problem