this was actually causing tons of false reports because people are often creating the database without the encoding parameter, especially when testing upgrades

MDL-24080 new $notlike parameter added to our new sql_like(), hopefully nobody started using the $escaped param yet; unittests  included

MDL-23925 completely reverting binary comparison hack, we have to instruct admins to setup case+accent sensitive collation as default instead

MDL-23925, MDL-23888 new sql_ilike() and sql_binary_equal() - this should finally allow us to solve many collation issues consistently for all supported databases; please note this changes some behaviour for non-english languages when mysql used; expect more commits that actually make use of these new features

MDL-23682 new MySQL engine diagnostics + InnoDB is now used instead of MyISAM in new installs if available + improved mysql transaction support

MDL-23568 parameters of DML function insert_record are not modified any more < improved coding style, now using cast to array consistently

mysql and postgres to perform central normalisation of values for insert/
update/set_field. Now all DB drivers cast empty strings to 0 when working
with numeric columns (integer and decimal)

MDL-19474 One year and a half ago we started designing and implementing our new databse abstraction layer which included brand new moodle native drivers. Today we are finally removing old legacy drivers that were still using adodb internally. From now on the adodb will be used only in some authentication and enrolment plugins, we are probably going to drop adodb there too later in 2.x. Thanks everybody who helped test and improve our new drivers, even bigger thanks to all the great developers who created ADOdb!

(only InnoDB detected as trasaction-able)

solve its carences handling temp tables.

in various operations (casting, altering columns...)

causing named and qm parameters to be mixed in the same query. Curiously,
due to the ordered nature of the qms it wasn't breaking, but was incorrect.

MDL-19010 Fixing upgrade code to work with mysql. Also returning false when get_recordset_sql hits a SQL error, instead of crashing during upgrade with a Fatal error: Exception thrown without a stack frame in Unknown on line 0

lib/dml: new compatibility method sql_cast_2signed for when MySQL thinks that 1 * -1 = 18446744073709551615

MDL-18244 sql_length() - new cross-db function to calculate the length in chars of any expression ; from 19_STABLE