You should probably not be using the DB API to load the field value. Since (in theory) we are able to have our actual field data stored in various back-ends, you should only really load the data via node or entity loading functions.
The node table itself is still reliably in Sql though, so you can select which node to display via the DB API.
Peter
I agree peter and that's why I was exploring the entityController class but did not see a good example of how I would do what I need - return the body field for the node of type 'frontpage_quote'. I originally needed a random result and the site is only going to have 10 at most so performance is not an issue as this is a light weight marketing site, but I appreciate the DB questioning/ideas on the random issue. blaine