The COMMIT TRANSACTION request has no corresponding BEGIN TRANSACTION

Question

Here's a strange problem I'm running into on a production server. It has happened twice in the last two weeks, and this is a server that gets a lot of traffic.

We have some code in a Web Service that executes a BEGIN TRAN, then runs a few SQL queries (two inserts followed by an update). Then at the end executes a COMMIT. Twice now we have gotten the message in the logs:

The COMMIT TRANSACTION request has no corresponding BEGIN TRANSACTION.

Between the first two inserts and the update, we call another web service, so there could be a slight delay between the first two inserts and last update before the COMMIT is called. Could this be causing our problem? We're running this on IIS 7 and Server 2008 R2 (all updated applied).

Originally we though it could be the app pools getting recycled, but changed that to recycle in the middle of the night. Now I'm not sure what would be causing SQL server to forget the call to BEGIN TRAN.

This web service does get called quite a bit. Has anyone seen something like this before? I'm at a total loss at the moment...

Any help or suggestion appreciated greatly!

Answer 1

It looks like your transaction failed, got rolled back and there is nothing to commit

example of such a thing

CREATE TABLE BlaTest(id INT PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL) GO 

Now run this

BEGIN TRAN  INSERT BlaTest VALUES('a') GO  COMMIT TRAN 

Here is the error

Msg 245, Level 16, State 1, Line 3 Conversion failed when converting the varchar value 'a' to data type int. Msg 3902, Level 16, State 1, Line 2 The COMMIT TRANSACTION request has no corresponding BEGIN TRANSACTION. 

This will run without a problem

BEGIN TRAN  INSERT BlaTest VALUES(5) GO  COMMIT TRAN 

A good article on transactions is Error Handling in SQL 2005 and Later by Erland Sommarskog