ASA SQL User's Guide
Monitoring and Improving Performance
Top performance tips
If your application runs in autocommit mode, then Adaptive Server Anywhere treats each of your statements as a separate transaction. In effect, it is equivalent to appending a COMMIT statement to the end of each of your commands.
Instead of running in autocommit mode, consider grouping your commands so each group performs one logical task. If you do disable autocommit, you must execute an explicit commit after each logical group of commands. Also, be aware that if logical transactions are large, blocking and deadlock can happen.
The cost of using autocommit mode is particularly high if you are not using a transaction log file. Every statement forces a checkpoint—an operation that can involve writing numerous pages of information to disk.
Each application interface has its own way of setting autocommit behavior. For the Open Client, ODBC, and JDBC interfaces, Autocommit is the default behavior.
For more information about autocommit, see Setting autocommit or manual commit mode.