Local autonomy means that all the data in the distributed network is owned and managed locally. For example, a site in New York might have a remote database that participates in a national distributed system. While functioning as a part of the distributed network, the New York database continues to process local operations independently from the overall distributed system, and does not rely on the distributed system to function. Oracle enables this feature in Net8 by allowing each database to function independently from other "linked" databases.
Various other distributed database methods and implementation techniques exist. Some of these methods are local autonomy, synchronous and asynchronous distributed database technologies where the technology behind them does not depend on the business needs or confidentiality of the data which will be placed inside the database.