Can you use channels in a plugin's SQL call?

I am working on a website where the core of the code is in a plugin. The plugin contains calls like this…

SELECT field_id_206 FROM exp_channel_data WHERE field_id_206>20

What I would like to do is replace the hard coded field ids (e.g. field_id_206) with channel tags (e.g. {holiday})

The above example is trivial to do using just channels, but in this specific case the database contains both Expression Engine and none Expression Engine tables and so I have to write my own SQL calls to access them.

I know I could use calls to exp_channel_fields to find the channel ids, but I am hoping for something cleaner.