entombed in the shrine of zeroes and ones

Where's the unbounded part? I saw "For example, the Microsoft Jet database engine can consume large amounts of memory (up to 128 MB on a 256-MB computer) because it retrieves data and writes caches" and stopped reading because it was clearly bounded.

Try this instead: http://www.solarisinternals.com/wiki/index.php/ZFS_Best_Practices_Guide#Memory_and_Swap_Space