That will depend greatly on how you use your database (number of queries over time, type of queries, size of returned data, etc...). I worked on a large DB int

That will depend greatly on how you use your database (number of queries over time, type of queries, size of returned data, etc...). I worked on a large DB intensive eCommerce site, with a large number of writes and un-cachable data. While it worked great locally, trying to point a cluster at the DB in the backup data center (50 ms away on a dedicated backbone line) absolutely killed performance. Also, for another eCommerce site, the local dev instance on my laptop boots in about ~ 1 minute when running against a local database. It takes about ~10 minutes when running against the corporate dev db over the VPN connection (~50ms added latency). However, for an application with more cacheable data, and less queries per second, it would matter less.