Techniques are provided for more efficient multi-row atomic, consistent, isolated and durable (ACID)-compliant transactions with snapshot isolation semantics (or just “multi-row transactions” for short). In some embodiments, the techniques are implemented in a computing system that includes a client application, a lightweight in-memory lease-based lock service, a multi-row transaction orchestrator, and an underlying database system. The transaction orchestrator implements a read protocol and a write protocol that provides support to the client application for carrying out multi-row transactions against the underlying database system irrespective of whether the database system itself supports multi-row transactions. The transaction orchestrator explicitly maintains transaction-level locks obtained from the lease-based lock service as part of the transaction protocol. Further, the transaction orchestrator is tolerant to lock service failure and unavailability without compromising ACID-compliance and snapshot isolation guarantees to the client application.