troubleshoot The current transaction cannot be committed and cannot support operations that write to the log file. Roll back the transaction.

Ran into a difficult-to-troubleshoot situation.

environment: SQL 2012, two databases, (A) one with full recovery model, (B) second with simple recovery model


A SP that works only against DB (A) starts a transaction, which later commits or rolls back, then invokes a second SP that works only against DB (B).

The second SP changes the tran isolation level to SERIALIZABLE, does a bunch of SELECTs then an UPDATE.

1% of the times the UPDATE (wrapped in TRY/CATCH) fails with 

The current transaction cannot be committed and cannot support operations that write to the log file. Roll back the transaction.

I can't figure out the true reason why the UPDATE crashes. Checked for potential data truncation, contraints etc and they are all good.

XTRAN_ABORT is OFF, at least in the outer SP.

Any ideas will be appreciated.

Thanks,

Nic