Modeling asynchrony in distributed databases

A new relationship type is proposed which permits describing the issues raised when information is distributed over autonomous workstations. Such federated environments are becoming the dominant form of distributed systems. Fully synchronous update of replicated data is not feasible in such systems. The proposed identity connection identifies data which should eventually match, but which can be in differing states for some time intervals. The concept permits modeling of the systems which are now becoming common in data processing.