is currently being supported in addition to nose, and will likely
be preferred to nose going forward.   The nose plugin system used
by SQLAlchemy has been split out so that it works under pytest as
well.  There are no plans to drop support for nose at the moment
and we hope that the test suite itself can continue to remain as
agnostic of testing platform as possible.  See the file
README.unittests.rst for updated information on running tests
with pytest.

The test plugin system has also been enhanced to support running
tests against mutiple database URLs at once, by specifying the ``--db``
and/or ``--dburi`` flags multiple times.  This does not run the entire test
suite for each database, but instead allows test cases that are specific
to certain backends make use of that backend as the test is run.
When using pytest as the test runner, the system will also run
specific test suites multiple times, once for each database, particularly
those tests within the "dialect suite".   The plan is that the enhanced
system will also be used by Alembic, and allow Alembic to run
migration operation tests against multiple backends in one run, including
third-party backends not included within Alembic itself.
Third party dialects and extensions are also encouraged to standardize
on SQLAlchemy's test suite as a basis; see the file README.dialects.rst
for background on building out from SQLAlchemy's test platform.

methods, classes, builtins, functools.partial(), everything known so far
- use get_callable_argspec() within ColumnDefault._maybe_wrap_callable, re: #2979

in particular the logic used to wrap "column default" callables
wouldn't work properly for Python built-ins.
fixes #2979

the first SQL expression would be applied as the "comparison type"
to a compared tuple value; this has the effect in some cases of an
inappropriate "type coersion" occurring, such as when a tuple that
has a mix of String and Binary values improperly coerces target
values to Binary even though that's not what they are on the left
side.  :func:`.tuple_` now expects heterogeneous types within its
list of values.
fixes #2977

isn't appended to the list.  reflection makes use of this.

a no-name :class:`.BindParameter` is received, e.g. via :func:`.sql.literal`
or similar; the "key" of the bind param is used as the key within
.c. rather than the rendered name.  Since these binds have "anonymous"
names in any case, this allows individual bound parameters to
have their own name within a selectable if they are otherwise unlabeled.
fixes #2974

when presented with duplicate columns.  The behavior of emitting a
warning and replacing the old column with the same name still
remains to some degree; the replacement in particular is to maintain
backwards compatibility.  However, the replaced column still remains
associated with the ``c`` collection now in a collection ``._all_columns``,
which is used by constructs such as aliases and unions, to deal with
the set of columns in ``c`` more towards what is actually in the
list of columns rather than the unique set of key names.  This helps
with situations where SELECT statements with same-named columns
are used in unions and such, so that the union can match the columns
up positionally and also there's some chance of :meth:`.FromClause.corresponding_column`
still being usable here (it can now return a column that is only
in selectable.c._all_columns and not otherwise named).
The new collection is underscored as we still need to decide where this
list might end up.   Theoretically it
would become the result of iter(selectable.c), however this would mean
that the length of the iteration would no longer match the length of
keys(), and that behavior needs to be checked out.
fixes #2974
- add a bunch more tests for ColumnCollection

of columns given positionally would not be preserved.   This could
have potential impact in positional situations such as applying the
resulting :class:`.TextAsFrom` object to a union.