Can we use 'GO' multiple times in SQL Transaction?

Question

Can We use GO statement mutiple times in a SQL Transaction. I am having a long T-SQL script and I want to run it in a SQL Transaction. If

Answer 1

You are mixing concepts. GO is not a Transact-SQL concept, not part of the language, and not understood by SQL Server. GO is the tools batch delimiter. sqlcmd.exe and SSMS both are using, by default, GO as the batch delimiter. The batch delimiter is used to identify the individual batches inside the SQL source file. The client tool sends to the server one batch at a time (of course, omitting the delimiter).

Transactions can span batches. TRY/CATCH blocks cannot. CREATE/ALTER statements must be the only statement in a batch (comments are not statements, and statements contained in a function procedure body are,well, contained).

Something similar to what you want to do can be achieved by starting a transaction and abortign the execution on first error (-b at sqlcmd.exe start, or use :on error exit in SSMS).

But doing DDL inside long transactions is not going to work. Specially if you plan to mix it with DML. Most corruptions I had to investigate come from this combination (Xact, DDL + DML, rollback). I strongly recommend against it.

The sole way to deploy schema updates safely is to take a backup, deploy, restore from backup if something goes wrong.

Note that what Dan recommends (dynamic SQL) works because sp_executesql starts a new, inner, batch. This batch will satisfy the CREATE/ALTER restrictions.