unbuffered_row() not working - returning null

The method can return false or null if there are any errors in the request or an empty result.
Depends on the type of driver selected.
Null can be returned by sqlsrv and mysqli drivers

Try to query the database using native php functions to check.

Thanks for the reply. There is definitely data returned by the query. If I do a result() instead:

PHP Code:

$this->db->query($sql)->result() 


It returns results (except I have to increase `memory_limit` to actually avoid memory exhausted errors)