I would instead look at it as turning autocommit "off" is more like turning "automatic transaction begin" "on", which is just a strange semantic. I could apprec

I would instead look at it as turning autocommit "off" is more like turning "automatic transaction begin" "on", which is just a strange semantic. I could appreciate a mechanism that insisted "transactions must always be explicit", but that isn't what autocommit controls, on or off. (You also wouldn't want such unless you were assured that you could put the transaction boundaries inside of multi-statement statements, as you really really want to minimize round trips there as otherwise you can end up--even on the same machine--drastically harming your lock contention by having transactions that last thousands of times longer than the single statement they wrapped... at which point the API is going to get awkward trying to enforce the transaction boundaries... autocommit is essentially just what you should want as the solution to all of this.)