Is this a covert reference to the 500-mile e-mail?
For example, I'm in Austin, querying a database hosted in Amazon's us-east-1 data center ("Northern Virginia"). Call it 1000 miles away, 2000 mile round trip.
You have: 2000 miles
You want: millilightseconds
2000 miles = 10.736388 millilightseconds
If I have a query that's taking < 1ms, no optimization of how that query is executed by the database can possibly improve the overall performance.