In a project she's been working on Lorna Mitchell was frustrated with something the CodeIgniter framework does natively - escape SQL statements done through the databaase layer's "select()" method. Thankfully, there was a simple fix to turn this behavior off.

I've been getting increasingly impatient with its tendency to try to escape my SQL code for me - this is a really useful default feature but it seems to assume I don't know what I'm doing and so it puts backticks all over perfectly acceptable SQL code, very annoying!

Thanks to a reply on twitter from damiangostomski to her frustrations she found the optional second parameter you can give the "select()" method, a boolean that tells it whether or not to escape the query (it's mentioned here) for those that were wondering.