Drupal seems keep a large amount of PHP serialisation of configuration in its database (a JSONish thing), probably because it's the standard data store for the site. Noticed this in fixing a dump one time. Got to use vim's function syntax for regex to ensure the character length count of the string matched the value of the new string.

I think virtually everything generically configurable in the UI that isn't part of a small core with dedicated fields (or in the sitewide PHP config include) is handled that way.