Differences between development and live database setups
I'd say that not having in development/test environments one that matches production will be a bad bet.

I worked for a shop where we didn't have an environment that matched production, so we couldn't do many of the tests as we should. I'm not saying that each developer/tester should have an env identical to production, but at least one environment for all devs/testers. And for usual development any environment will do. Testing performance of the code should be mandatory, if not for all pieces of code, than at least for the most used ones (can use profiling tools to find out).