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.

fixes #2970

e Please enter the commit message for your changes. Lines starting

pymysql) from working in Py3K, where a check for "connection
charset" would fail due to Py3K's more strict value comparison
rules.  The call in question  wasn't taking the database
version into account in any case as the server version was
still None at that point, so the method overall has been
simplified to rely upon connection.character_set_name().
[ticket:2933]

not happening too well (I need to stick with linux + freetds 0.91, I know)

to a DBLINK remote database; while the syntax has been present in the
Oracle dialect for some time, up until now it has never been tested.
The syntax has been tested against a sample database linking to itself,
however there's still some uncertainty as to what should be used for the
"owner" when querying the remote database for table information.
Currently, the value of "username" from user_db_links is used to
match the "owner".  [ticket:2619]