Oh ... in further answer to your question, *please* use the db_* API in any code that runs after bootstrap.
Don't use the inferior template::query API, either. That's scheduled to disappear in the future. In particular the parameter parser for all of the template and form stuff doesn't do any meaningful error checking. We'll keep the non-db template stuff, of course, but the smarter db_* code is the right stuff to use.
