SAVE TRANSACTION vs BEGIN TRANSACTION (SQL Server) how to nest transactions nicely

Question

I have a stored procedure that needs to set a save point so that it can, under certain circumstances, undo everything it did and return an error code to the caller, or accep

Answer 1

Extending Brian B's answer.

This ensures the save point name is unique and uses the new TRY/CATCH/THROW features of SQL Server 2012.

DECLARE @mark CHAR(32) = replace(newid(), '-', '');
DECLARE @trans INT = @@TRANCOUNT;

IF @trans = 0
    BEGIN TRANSACTION @mark;
ELSE
    SAVE TRANSACTION @mark;

BEGIN TRY
    -- do work here

    IF @trans = 0
        COMMIT TRANSACTION @mark;
END TRY
BEGIN CATCH
    IF xact_state() = 1 OR (@trans = 0 AND xact_state() <> 0) ROLLBACK TRANSACTION @mark;
    THROW;
END CATCH