[eluser]everdaniel[/eluser]
[quote author="kgill" date="1232059522"]If you want to use built-in functions you're pretty much going to have to abandon active record, anything you send is going to be quoted and treated as a string. Your other option is to modify the driver file and add a line to the _insert and _update functions to replace 'CURDATE()' with CURDATE().[/quote]
You don't need to change any CI core file, as I said, you just need to use the set() method and pass FALSE as the third argument and that's it, CI won't quote the string.