In my example above, identity == userId, which would presumably be unchanged. If they used some system with synthetic primary keys and a uniqueness constraint on the userId, then no problem. Re: explicit versioning being meant to represent database versioning, true enough, but using a simple increment counter is a pretty common way to do database versioning. Note that all of my discussion here isn't meant to advocate against keeping a tombstone on the local node; just trying to identify problem areas and see how significant. Seems like this is a pretty small corner case that's preventable by using a synthetic primary key or a non-repeatable db version. View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4097498#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...