PREVENTING AND RECOVERING FROM DUPLICATION IN A CONFIGURATION MANAGEMENT DATABASE

A software application may have access to: (i) an identification condition that indicates a first subset of configuration-element attributes that can be used to identify configuration elements, and (ii) an exception indicating a second subset of the attributes that a module does not support. The software application may be configured to: based on the identification condition and the exception, search representations of configuration elements in a persistent storage in attempt to find a matching representation that characterizes information from the module, where the matching representation is found when one of the representations and the information from the module contain identical values for all of the attributes in the first subset excluding those also in the second subset; based on the search, determine that the matching representation is not found; and write, to the persistent storage, a new representation specifying values for attribute(s) according to the information from the module.