DB doesn't have num_rows/numRows ??

I'd also like to see any analysis detailing these 'performance problems' in the most commonly used PHP databases. I might be mistaken, but I'd wager the vast majority of CodeIgniter installations use MySQL/MariaDB, PostgreSQL, or MSSQL and all these DB extensions offer a numrows function.

EDIT:

But as that diff pointed out - you can tell if you have results by checking the response itself. If you need to know the number of results exactly, grab the results and count the returned array. Simple.

This is too simple. I have one query which might return a very large result set with several thousand records. It would be a shame to waste CPU and memory power instantiating this simply to find out how many records were returned.