5.1.3 Statement Completion

When a connection is in auto-commit mode, the statements being executed within it are committed or rolled back when they are completed. A statement is considered complete when it has been executed and all its results have been returned. For the method executeQuery, which returns one result set, the statement is completed when all the rows of the ResultSet object have been retrieved. For the method executeUpdate, a statement is completed when it is executed. In the rare cases where the method execute is called, however, a statement is not complete until all of the result sets or update counts it generated have been retrieved.

Some DBMSs treat each statement in a stored procedure as a separate statement; others treat the entire procedure as one compound statement. This difference becomes important when auto-commit is enabled because it affects when the method commit is called. In the first case, each statement is individually committed; in the second, all are committed together.