Should I use begin tran to do an alter table column that increases the column length? I want to execute this statement in a production database to alter the length of a varchar column from 50 to 72:

ALTER TABLE Users ALTER COLUMN LoginID varchar(72) NOT NULL


The column is not null so I'm NOT altering column nullability from NULL to NOT NULL.

Database server is SQL Server 2008 R2; table has about 60,000 records.

Do I have to put the alter statment within begin tran commit tran?
The statement is atomic and is its own transaction, so no, there is no value in surrounding it with BEGIN TRANSACTION; / COMMIT TRANSACTION;. It will either succeed in whole or fail in whole.