Latency is a critical consideration for developers when choosing a database for their application, as it can significantly impact the user experience. A high-level framework can help developers think about latency by considering three key dimensions: external latency (the time it takes for data to travel from the application to the database), internal latency (the time it takes for the database to process a request), and tradeoffs between consistency, availability, scalability, and variance. By applying this framework, developers can make informed decisions about which databases will meet their application's latency requirements. In the context of Fauna, a serverless, geographically distributed, strongly consistent, transactional database that is consumed as an API, the framework suggests evaluating internal and external latencies based on user locations and network distances. By using this framework, developers can compare the projected average latencies of different databases and make informed decisions about which one to use for their application.