has query escaping problem been fixed in 1.7?

[eluser]Phil Sturgeon[/eluser]
Well the AR is not meant as a standard SQL implementation, it is a new way of doing things based on SQL. Mixing AR and pure SQL will always cause you issues, more-so now that in the past as the dev team get stricter on what is allowed in the AR functions.

It makes sense really. If you want to do a simple query, use AR. If you want sub-queries, unions, boolen searches, etc, use pure SQL with query().