You're right that minutes matter here, and so does correctness. Most applications with a database depend strongly on that database layer to provide various guarantees and correctness.
Personally, I think having a database and then tuning it for performance is the best option, followed by not having a database and being faster. Having the database but then running it in an emulator on a VM on your infra (which is probably itself a VM), as in this case, seems like a bad call.
Personally, I think having a database and then tuning it for performance is the best option, followed by not having a database and being faster. Having the database but then running it in an emulator on a VM on your infra (which is probably itself a VM), as in this case, seems like a bad call.