What is the difference between “;” and “GO” in T-SQL?

Question

I use ADO.NET as well as the sqlcmd utility to send SQL scripts to SQL Server 2008. What is the difference between using ; and GO to separate chunk

Answer 1

"GO" is similar to ; in many cases, but does in fact signify the end of a batch.

Each batch is committed when the "GO" statement is called, so if you have:

SELECT * FROM table-that-does-not-exist;
SELECT * FROM good-table;

in your batch, then the good-table select will never get called because the first select will cause an error.

If you instead had:

SELECT * FROM table-that-does-not-exist
GO
SELECT * FROM good-table
GO

The first select statement still causes an error, but since the second statement is in its own batch, it will still execute.

GO has nothing to do with committing a transaction.