In computer science and data management , a commit is the making of a set of tentative changes permanent. A popular usage is at the end of a transaction . A commit is an act of committing. A COMMIT statement in SQL ends a transaction within a relational database management system (RDBMS) and makes all changes visible to other users. The general format is to issue a BEGIN WORK statement, one or more SQL statements, and then the COMMIT statement. Alternatively, a ROLLBACK statement can be issued, which undoes all the work performed since BEGIN WORK was issued. A COMMIT statement will also release any existing savepoints that may be in use. In terms of transactions, the opposite of commit is to discard the tentative changes of a transaction, a rollback . In revision control systems, a commit adds the latest changes to [part of] the source code to the repository, making these changes part of the head revision of the repository. Unlike commits in d