In this paper, our e_orts in characterizing the traffic of distributed database systems are described. This is an important class of applications considering that database or transaction processing systems form the core of several key commercial applications. Specific traffic source models for this application class have not been developed which is imperative for their successful deployment in emerging networks. The main contribution of this paper is to present the relationship between a distributed database application scenario and the corresponding network traffic characteristics, thus providing guidelines to these applications to compute their traffic descriptors accurately.