How do you indicate to ->condition that a value is binary?

In issue #2506005: PostgreSQL incompatible with Storage API, we've run into a problem where binary data is being passed as a value to the ->condition method, and on PostgreSQL, this typically results in a 'invalid byte sequence for encoding "UTF8"' error.

The code involved is

 $file_id = db_select('storage_file')
    ->fields('storage_file', array('file_id'))
    ->condition('whirlpool', $whirlpool)
    ->condition('filename', $filename)
    ->execute()
    ->fetchField();

The whirlpool field is defined as:

      'whirlpool' => array(
        'type' => 'blob', 'length' => 64, 'not null' => TRUE,
        'mysql_type' => 'BINARY(64)',
      ),

And the contents of $whirlpool is definitely binary, being returned from hash_file:


$whirlpool = hash_file('whirlpool', $uri, TRUE);


Is there some way of indicating that the value passed to ->condition is binary, and therefore should be properly escaped or formatted as such if the underlying database requires it? Is there a different way of handling it?