In a distributed system where a client's call to commit a transaction occurs outside the transaction's lock-hold interval, computation of timestamp information for the transaction is moved to a client library, while ensuring that no conflicting reads or writes are performed between a time of the computation and acquiring all locks for the transaction. The transaction is committed in phases, with each phase being initiated by the client library. Timestamp information is added to the locks to ensure that timestamps are generated during lock-hold intervals. An increased number of network messages is thereby overlapped with a commit wait period in which a write in a distributed database is delayed in time to ensure concurrency in the database.