We're mostly a MS shop, so we tend to use MS SQL Express instances on our dev machines. For the bulk of what we need to do day-to-day, this is exactly the same

We're mostly a MS shop, so we tend to use MS SQL Express instances on our dev machines. For the bulk of what we need to do day-to-day, this is exactly the same as if we were dealing with a full SQL server instance, a SQL cluster, or an Azure SQL database instance. One of the few times I will use a cloud database instance in development is to doublecheck performance of database queries, as the cloud instances will have considerably more latency than you'd ever see running a local database on a beefy workstation.