What is the difference between “;” and “GO” in T-SQL?

Question

I use ADO.NET as well as the sqlcmd utility to send SQL scripts to SQL Server 2008. What is the difference between using ; and GO to separate chunk

Answer 1

'GO' is typically used to indicate the end of a batch of SQL statements which means that you could have a begin transaction and end transaction wrapped up into a single collection of statements that could fail or succeed together.

';' is generally used to separate multiple SQL statements from one another. This is noticable in SQL scripts that need to return multiple recordsets, such as `select * from table1; select * from table2;' which would result in two separate recordsets on the client's side.