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Informix Error -355

-355 Cannot rename file for table.

This RENAME statement cannot be completed because the database server got an unexpected error. Check the accompanying ISAM error code for more detailed information on the cause. Possible causes include hardware errors and file-permission problems.

Oninit® Troubleshooting Guidance

Reasons / Common Causes

-355 is an infrastructure-level failure during a RENAME operation (renaming a table or column): the underlying file rename at the OS level fails unexpectedly, most commonly due to hardware errors or file permission problems rather than a mistake in the SQL statement itself.

  1. File permission issues preventing the server process from renaming the underlying storage file.
  2. Hardware-level errors — disk I/O failures affecting the filesystem where the table's storage file resides.
  3. Filesystem-level constraints (e.g. attempting to rename across filesystem boundaries in a way the OS doesn't support for the underlying rename call).
Solutions / Resolution
  1. Check the accompanying ISAM error code first, per the official guidance, for the specific underlying reason.
  2. Check filesystem permissions on the table's underlying storage location for the Informix server process.
  3. Check for hardware/disk-level problems in the online log and OS logs around the same timestamp.
Examples
Checking permissions and OS logs before retrying
ls -la /informix/dbspaces/sales.dbs/
dmesg | tail -50
-- confirm permissions look correct and check for any recent
-- disk I/O errors
Diagnostic Checks
  1. Read the accompanying ISAM error code for the specific underlying reason.
  2. Check filesystem permissions at the table's storage location.
  3. Check for hardware/disk-level errors around the same timestamp.
Related Errors / Related Topics
  • -328 — "Column column-name already exists in table." Another RENAME-adjacent error, though a straightforward naming-collision mistake rather than this infrastructure-level failure.

This is an OS/infrastructure-level failure, not a SQL-statement mistake — the ISAM error code and filesystem checks are the real diagnostic starting point.