createCommand sql query not working in plugin
Thanks to @carlcs for pointers managed to get this working with the following:

$criteria = craft()-&gt;elements-&gt;getCriteria(ElementType::User);
$criteria-&gt;limit = NULL;

$query = craft()-&gt;elements-&gt;buildElementsQuery($criteria);
$params = array(
    ':interest' =&gt; '%"8948"%',
);
$query-&gt;andWhere("field_interests LIKE :interest", $params);
$result = $query-&gt;queryAll() ;