My guess is that it is because it is how most people expect it to behave. I certainly do, and I'm not alone.The reason for disable the auto-commit is to mimic more or less similar to oracle behaviour. Because our existing system was in oracle. Just asking out of curiosity – why we enable auto-commit by default in Maria DB. I felt that it wont give control on how we maintain the transaction.
"When a connection is created, it is in auto-commit mode. This means that each individual SQL statement is treated as a transaction and is automatically committed right after it is executed. (To be more precise, the default is for a SQL statement to be committed when it is completed, not when it is executed. A statement is completed when all of its result sets and update counts have been retrieved. In almost all cases, however, a statement is completed, and therefore committed, right after it is executed.)
The way to allow two or more statements to be grouped into a transaction is to disable the auto-commit mode. This is demonstrated in the following code, where con is an active connection:
con.setAutoCommit(false);