Curly Braces are removed from UPDATEs and INSERTs

When I edit (UPDATE) a field that contains curly braces, they disappear from the final value.

I suppose this is due to calling db_query which, in turn, calls db_prefix_tables, which seems to be overzealous at times.

If I explicitely run the following INSERT:

INSERT INTO {variable} (name, value) VALUES ('test', 'val{ue}s{}');

Then what is actually retrieved when I query looks like this:

SELECT * FROM {variable} WHERE name='test';

Result
name	value
test	values

As you see, "val{ue}s{}" gets turned into "values" upon INSERTion. This is particularly painful when attempting to edit a record containing serialized data, as it removes the braces (thus, corrupting the serialized data).

The only potential fix that I could see for it would be to separate out the INSERTed (or UPDATEd) fields into args for db_query (only the $query part passed to db_query is passed to db_prefix_tables). This would be useful for form-based edits, but freeform SQL would be more problematic to fix.

-Mark