25002ERRORTier 2 — Caution✅ HIGH confidence

active SQL transaction

Category: Invalid Transaction StateVersions: All Postgres versions

What this means

SQLSTATE 25002 is raised when a command that requires no active transaction is issued while a transaction is in progress. Certain DDL commands and session-level settings cannot be executed inside a transaction block.

Why it happens

1Running VACUUM, CLUSTER, or certain CREATE DATABASE commands inside a BEGIN...COMMIT block
2Issuing a command that requires autocommit context inside an explicit transaction

How to reproduce

VACUUM inside a transaction block.

trigger — this will ERROR

BEGIN;
VACUUM ANALYZE employees; -- not allowed inside transaction

ERROR: VACUUM cannot run inside a transaction block

Fix 1: Execute the command outside a transaction block

When a command requiring no active transaction is needed.

fix

-- Do not wrap in BEGIN...COMMIT:
VACUUM ANALYZE employees;

Why this works

VACUUM and similar commands must be executed as standalone statements in autocommit mode, not inside explicit transaction blocks.

Sources

📚 Official docs: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/errcodes-appendix.html

🔧 Source ref: Class 25 — Invalid Transaction State

Confidence assessment

✅ HIGH confidence

Standard SQLSTATE. Stable across versions.