codeigniter active record bug?

[eluser]JHackamack[/eluser]
Right after your query runs have you echoed out:

$this->db->last_query();

are the results the same, or different for the second date format.

Also another thing to try that might be foiling it is aliasing your columsn

DATE_FORMAT(start_date, '%d %b, %Y') as start_date

I believe MySQL assigns a date_format to both columns, so one will overwrite the other.