So I spent more time than I'd like to disclose finding out this little bit of undocumented gem:
So when you're doing something like: db.all(sql,params,callback)
this wont work
where params and sql is something like:
var params = { $param1 : 'some string' };
var sql = 'select * from FOO where FOO.name LIKE "%$param1%"';
Answered below.