With OpenAccess, the changes are always committed inside a transaction. Even if you do not create one, OpenAccess starts a transaction when you call SaveChanges() and either all changes are written in the database or none of them. The changes that are committed within that transaction are the changes made after your last SaveChanges() call or after your context initialization in the case this is your first SaveChanges() call with that context.

Even though there is no way you can push only partial changes to the database, the exceptions that can arise during a SaveChanges() call are countless. In the case the exception is thrown from the SQL Server, that is the exception propagated to the user. It usually contains the SQL Statement that caused the exception if there is one. Having the SQL statement that caused the exception, should give you some valuable information when you debug problems of this kind.

There are also number of exception that contain information about the entity that caused the exception, and the SqlException is passed as an inner exception. Not all exceptions are caused by a specific entity, but we always try to give as much as valuable information as possible so we make the life of the debugging developer easier with our product. We will appreciate any feedback for any exception that you find which is not giving enough information o is misleading in your opinion.