Informix Error -699

Reasons / Common Causes

-699 fires when every participating server in an Informix STAR two-phase-commit transaction heuristically rolls back — per the official guidance, unlike -698's mixed-outcome scenario, this is a consistent result: because all participants rolled back, the networked database system remains consistent.

1. Every participant independently deciding to roll back (a shared cause — a coordinator timeout affecting all participants, a widespread network issue) — the specific mechanism isn't named by the sparse official text, but the outcome (uniform rollback) is what makes this distinct from -698.
2. The application's own transaction logic deciding to abort, propagating a rollback signal that reached every participant before any of them committed.

Solutions / Resolution

1. No administrative intervention is required for data consistency — per the official guidance, the system remains consistent since every participant rolled back uniformly.
2. The transaction simply didn't complete — retry it from the application side if the work it was attempting still needs to happen.
3. If heuristic rollbacks are recurring, investigate why participants are making independent decisions rather than waiting for the coordinator — the same investigation suggested for -629, commonly a timeout setting too aggressive for the transaction's actual duration.

Examples

Retrying the transaction

-- The original distributed transaction rolled back cleanly (all
-- participants). Simply retry the application logic that initiated it.

Diagnostic Checks

1. Confirm no data-consistency concern exists — per the official guidance, a uniform heuristic rollback across all participants is a consistent outcome, unlike -698.
2. If recurring, review participant timeout configuration, the same investigation as for -629.

Related Errors / Related Topics

• -629 — "Cannot end heuristically rolled back transaction." A related error about ending a heuristically rolled back transaction specifically at the coordinator, rather than reporting the overall uniform-rollback outcome.
• -698 — "Inconsistent transaction. Number and names of servers rolled back - servers." The contrasting, genuinely concerning outcome: a mixed result across participants, which -699 is explicitly not.

A consistent outcome, unlike -698 — every participant rolled back uniformly, so no data reconciliation is needed; just retry the work if it still needs to happen.