Still limited to a measly 208gb of RAM? That was pretty good back in the day, but now my desktop workstation has 128gb. AWS offers up to 488gb on their latest R4 instances, and 2tb on their X1 instances released a year ago.
> You'll be able to use the new processor with Compute Engine’s standard, highmem, highcpu and custom machine types. We also plan to continue to introduce bigger and better VM instance types that offer more vCPUs and RAM for compute- and memory-intensive workloads.
[1] https://cloudplatform.googleblog.com/2016/11/power-up-your-G...
Even on the less complicated end, some years ago throwing a shitload of page cache at MongoDB was the only way to maintain high write loads, and eventually one reached a point where one had to keep an entire shard in cache. That bottom end threshold is lower than you think. I don't know if that's changed.
The key here is it's a personal development workstation on which he has these resources. If that's a requirement, I would argue there's something fundamentally wrong with his development processes requiring that much data locally without even a server.
I'd love to spin up a 32x512GB for a DB Server.