I understand that an explicit declaration of a distributed transaction (BEGIN DISTRIBUTED TRANSACTION) does not change the @@TRANCOUNT return value at all (and correct me if I'm wrong, because I was unable to test it by myself due to the lack of MS DTC in my testing platform). But I'm concerned about what could possibly happen with this value when a normal, local transaction, automatically escalates to a distributed one because of a command referring to an external database.
Any idea?