Embodiments relate to a compacting datafiles generated by a database node using a compaction processing node with separate compute resources. The database node generates datafiles and stores the datafiles in a data store. To perform compacting of the datafiles, a snapshot of the data store is created and stored in a snapshot store separate from the data store. The compaction processing node is initiated and attached with the snapshot store. The compaction processing node generates a compacted datafile that is stored in the snapshot store. The database node replaces the data store with the snapshot store, and writes additional datafiles using the snapshot store as a new data store. The compaction processing node may be an instance of a cloud compute infrastructure that is initiated to perform the compaction to reduce compute resource usage by the database node.