There is still also non-zero overhead associated with making queries in general, in both the querying and query-answering process. The ceiling of the range whe

There is still also non-zero overhead associated with making queries in general, in both the querying and query-answering process. The ceiling of the range where you can get away with this without user-visible performance impact will be much higher, and the relative performance difference may be smaller, but in general fewer queries for the same data will still be better in general. Even with an in-process DB, you're still essentially making a sort of context switch.