L' Eomot Inversé (10/28/2013)

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Nice question.

Has one small problem though: the code leaves a transaction open - nothing is actually committed.

It's clearly stated in BOL:-

Although each COMMIT TRANSACTION statement has a transaction_name parameter, there is no relationship between the COMMIT TRANSACTION and BEGIN TRANSACTION statements. The transaction_name parameters are simply readability aids to help the programmer ensure that the proper number of commits are coded to decrement @@TRANCOUNT to 0 and thereby commit the outer transaction.

Thus the COMMIT TRAN A stement simply decrements the trancount to close the innermost the innermost open transaction since there are still two transactions open when it is encountered: the transaction named A and the transaction named B, since ROLLBACK TRAN B rolled back to the savepoint labelled B, and that savepoint includes some work done in teh transaction named B. The transaction named A, which is the outermost transaction, remains uncommitted.