The subject technology receives, by a distributed database, transactional queries against a key-value database comprising data managed by key-value pairs. The subject technology performs, using asynchronous threads of execution nodes of the distributed database, asynchronous transformation and compaction of key-value pairs of data that corresponds to the plurality of transactional queries. The subject technology performs, using asynchronous threads of execution nodes of the distributed database, asynchronous transformation and compaction of a set of secondary indexes that corresponds to the plurality of transactional queries. The subject technology processes, using transactional threads in the execution nodes, the plurality of transactional queries to generate results data, the asynchronous threads performing the asynchronous transformation and compaction while the transactional threads generate the results data.