Firstly, BEGIN..END are merely syntactic elements, and have nothing to do with transactions.
Secondly, in Oracle all individual DML statements are atomic (i.e. they either succeed in full, or rollback any intermediate changes on the first failure) (unless you use the EXCEPTIONS INTO option, which I won’t go into here).
If you wish a group of statements to be treated as a single atomic transaction, you’d do something like this:
BEGIN
SAVEPOINT start_tran;
INSERT INTO .... ; -- first DML
UPDATE .... ; -- second DML
BEGIN ... END; -- some other work
UPDATE .... ; -- final DML
EXCEPTION
WHEN OTHERS THEN
ROLLBACK TO start_tran;
RAISE;
END;
That way, any exception will cause the statements in this block to be rolled back, but any statements that were run prior to this block will not be rolled back.
Note that I don’t include a COMMIT – usually I prefer the calling process to issue the commit.
It is true that a BEGIN..END block with no exception handler will automatically handle this for you:
BEGIN
INSERT INTO .... ; -- first DML
UPDATE .... ; -- second DML
BEGIN ... END; -- some other work
UPDATE .... ; -- final DML
END;
If an exception is raised, all the inserts and updates will be rolled back; but as soon as you want to add an exception handler, it won’t rollback. So I prefer the explicit method using savepoints.