Sorry to ask this question here, since it is not strictly MariaDB-related, but I need the knowledge of people that develop with databases: is there significant overhead to using a DBMS versus a storage engine directly?

I have a project for which speed / latency is very important, and I was wondering if I could make significant performance gains by using a storage engine (such as WiredTiger, RocksDB, LevelDB, etc.) directly instead of using a DBMS (like MariaDB). More concretely, are there any studies out there on this to give me some objective numbers on this?

Assume it is over a local loopback connection, so pretty much only the overhead of the networking itself would apply.

Thank you in advance,

- Jonathan M. Wilbur