Microsoft® SQL Server™ 2000 Unleashed, Second Edition

Transactions and Triggers

SQL Server 2000 provides two types of triggers—AFTER triggers and INSTEAD OF triggers. INSTEAD OF triggers perform their actions before and modifications are made to the actual table the trigger is defined on.

Whenever trigger is invoked, it is always invoked within another transaction, whether it's a single statement AutoCommit transaction, or a user-defined multistatement transaction. This is true for both AFTER triggers and INSTEAD OF triggers. Even though an INSTEAD OF trigger fires before, or “instead of” the data modification statement itself, if a transaction is not already active, an AutoCommit transaction is still automatically initiated as the data modification statement is invoked. (For more information on ...