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.

here is that "lockmode" is also public in Session.refresh().

entity returns without otherwise changing much [ticket:2824]

- rework the event system so that event modules load after their
targets, dependencies are reversed
- create an improved strategy lookup system for the ORM
- rework the ORM to have very few import cycles
- move out "importlater" to just util.dependency
- other tricks to cross-populate modules in as clear a way as possible

when loading mapped entities.   The function overhead of applying
a per-object deferred callable to an instance at load time was
significantly higher than that of just loading the data from the row
(note that ``defer()`` is meant to reduce DB/network overhead, not
necessarily function call count); the function call overhead is now
less than that of loading data from the column in all cases.  There
is also a reduction in the number of "lazy callable" objects created
per load from N (total deferred values in the result) to 1 (total
number of deferred cols).
[ticket:2778]

- went through examples/ and cleaned out excess list() calls

where an entity may be ``None`` without throwing an error.
[ticket:2640]