I suggest that your applications will benefit from intelligent design rather than generic tools.

I tend to follow that philosophy, but there are other programmers working on this codebase and it's sometimes unreasonable to ask the same of them.

If I can put together a tool that presents a simple way of doing X, while solving problems Y and Z, we'll wind up with more consistent code, and we'll be able to focus on the higher levels of abstraction while creating programs. Historically, this has come at the expense of performance, though.

Anyways, it looks like the high memory usage that I'm seeing might be a MySQL-exclusive phenomenon.