Informix Error -744

Reasons / Common Causes

-744 fires when a trigger's triggered action includes BEGIN WORK, COMMIT WORK, ROLLBACK WORK, or SET CONSTRAINTS — per the official guidance, none of these four statements are allowed as triggered actions, since a trigger fires as part of an already-in-progress statement and shouldn't control transaction boundaries or constraint-checking mode itself.

1. A triggered action including BEGIN WORK/COMMIT WORK/ROLLBACK WORK, per the official guidance — transaction control belongs to the statement that caused the trigger to fire, not the trigger itself.
2. A triggered action including SET CONSTRAINTS, per the official guidance — changing constraint-checking mode mid-trigger isn't supported.
3. Logic copy-pasted from a standalone SPL routine (where these statements might be legitimate) into a trigger's action, without accounting for the different rules triggers impose.

Solutions / Resolution

1. Remove the offending statement, per the official guidance — this is a hard restriction, not something to work around within the trigger itself.
2. Move transaction-boundary logic to the application code that issues the statement causing the trigger to fire, rather than inside the trigger.
3. If constraint-mode changes are genuinely needed as part of the workflow, issue SET CONSTRAINTS before/after the triggering statement, in application code, rather than inside the trigger's action.

Examples

The disallowed attempt

CREATE TRIGGER trg_orders_insert INSERT ON orders
  REFERENCING NEW AS post FOR EACH ROW
  (COMMIT WORK, EXECUTE PROCEDURE log_new_order(post.order_id));
-- -744: COMMIT WORK isn't allowed as a triggered action

Corrected — remove it

CREATE TRIGGER trg_orders_insert INSERT ON orders
  REFERENCING NEW AS post FOR EACH ROW
  (EXECUTE PROCEDURE log_new_order(post.order_id));

Diagnostic Checks

1. Scan the trigger's action list for BEGIN WORK, COMMIT WORK, ROLLBACK WORK, or SET CONSTRAINTS, and remove it, moving any needed transaction/constraint-mode control to the calling application code.

Related Errors / Related Topics

• -675 — "Illegal SQL statement in SPL routine." A related restriction on disallowed statements in a different context (a routine called from SELECT) rather than trigger actions.

Four specific statement types are disallowed as triggered actions — move transaction/constraint- mode control to the calling application code instead.