In Adaptive Server, the System Administrator can enforce or relax the requirement to have distributed transactions commit or roll back as a logical unit by setting the strict dtm enforcement configuration parameter.
You can also override the value of strict dtm enforcement using the session level set command with the strict_dtm_enforcement option.
strict dtm enforcement determines whether or not Adaptive Server transaction coordination services will strictly enforce the ACID properties of distributed transactions.
Setting strict dtm enforcement to 1 (on) ensures that transactions are propagated only to servers that can participate in Adaptive Server-coordinated transactions. If a transaction attempts to update data in a server that does not support transaction coordination services, Adaptive Server aborts the transaction.
In heterogeneous environments, you may want to make use of servers that do not support transaction coordination. This includes older versions of Adaptive Server and non-Sybase database stores configured using CIS. Under these circumstances, you can set strict dtm enforcement to 0 (off). This allows Adaptive Server to propagate transactions to legacy Adaptive Servers and other data stores, but does not ensure that the remote work of these servers is rolled back or committed with the original transaction.