>Hi,
>
>Could anybody point me to litterature or anything about multi site offline systems that are synchronized a bit like palmtops, periodically.
>
>Practically it concerns a company that has multiple sites situated on different continents but using a common database: clients, inventory, etc.
>
>How do you solve problems of duplicate keys, conflicting information entered at different sites etc.

I've done it once for a wheat merchant, who had four silos with computers on the site - each site was given a characteristic prefix, which prefixed all the PKs of the records they created in all of the tables, and that was used for synchronizing with the central. They also gave temporary IDs (with the same prefix) to their customers (i.e. peasants), and then these temporary IDs were (supposed to be) replaced with regular IDs in the central. There was some two-way updating routine which replaced the IDs in both incoming and outgoing data, which was somewhat tricky to do, but it generally worked. We had much more trouble with bad phone lines and bad floppies than with the logic itself.

HTH