A system, method, and computer program product is disclosed for synchronizing access permissions across at least two disparate database systems. A source database system is coupled to a destination database system, using an asynchronous parallel processing system with a set of processing engines whereby each of the processing engines has independent access, separate from each other processing engines, to both the source database and the destination database. A set of self-contained synchronization rules for synchronizing access permissions from the source database system to the destination database system is distributed to execute on the set of processing engines, wherein each of the self-contained synchronization rules are XML formatted data to define a conversion mapping for access permissions from the source database system to analogous access permissions on a destination database and each of the self-contained synchronization rules are able to execute on a processing engine independently.