Codeigniter: Connect to SSL Amazon RDS Database
$db['default']['port'] = 3306;Try adding that to db config. mysql_real_connect() expects param 6 to be a LONG int; balks at empty string.
Update
The function below line 140 in DB_Driver is where the dbcollat and charset are set. Those will hit real_escape in the driver, and cause the escape_error if not correct.
Try
$db['default']['dbcollat']='';Or, check that the encoding your db is set for what you have in your db config. i.e. if your db charset is latin1 and you are using utf-8, the conn_id will be wrong and mysqli_escape will balk.