If you have more than one statement, then autocommit is usually wrong, and what you usually want is transaction-per-request. If you have exactly one statement,

If you have more than one statement, then autocommit is usually wrong, and what you usually want is transaction-per-request. If you have exactly one statement, then autocommit is exactly identical to transaction-per-request. Also part of the transaction-per-request pattern is that the transaction is started when the first statement is invoked. So there's no overhead for zero-statement requests either.