Unlike Java/JS, firestore's python transactions do not retry on invalid transaction errors

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@pcbeingused333 is already working on this.

Since Nov 13, 2026.

  • #19066 by @pcbeingused333 — open

Assessment

Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
python
Domain
databases

Research direction

Read the Python Firestore transaction retry behavior described in the issue and compare it with the linked Node and Java fixes. An open pull request, #19066, is already linked, so check its scope and status before considering this work. Done means invalid-transaction errors are retried consistently with the expected behavior.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

triage me type: bug
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Summary of the issue

Context
We use firestore transactions with some reasonable load. For whatever reason the error rate has been elevated today that doesn't seem to match any change in our traffic or usage.

Expected Behavior:
I'd expect transaction's retry behavior to be consistent across platforms. Instead some platforms retry invalid transaction errors but python does not.

Node: https://github.com/googleapis/nodejs-firestore/pull/1347
Java: https://github.com/googleapis/java-firestore/pull/447

Actual Behavior:
Python firestore transactions seem not to retry this error message

API client name and version

google-cloud-firestore 2.34.1

Reproduction steps: code

No response

Reproduction steps: supporting files

No response

Reproduction steps: actual results
_InactiveRpcError: <_InactiveRpcError of RPC that terminated with:
	status = StatusCode.INVALID_ARGUMENT
	details = "The referenced transaction has expired or is no longer valid."
	debug_error_string = "INVALID_ARGUMENT:The referenced transaction has expired or is no longer valid."
>
(2 additional frame(s) were not displayed)
...
  File "grpc/_interceptor.py", line 331, in _with_call
    return call.result(), call
  File "grpc/_channel.py", line 447, in result
    raise self
  File "grpc/_interceptor.py", line 314, in continuation
    response, call = self._thunk(new_method).with_call(
  File "grpc/_channel.py", line 1182, in with_call
    return _end_unary_response_blocking(state, call, True, None)
  File "grpc/_channel.py", line 999, in _end_unary_response_blocking
    raise _InactiveRpcError(state)  # pytype: disable=not-instantiable

InvalidArgument: The referenced transaction has expired or is no longer valid.
Reproduction steps: expected results

file: output.txtmydata.csv

Calculated: bar
OS & version + platform

Various

Python environment

Python 3.12.14

Python dependencies

No response

Additional context

No response

Dominant language
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