The code you provided works for me.

The call_user_func_array(...) function just calls the bindParam or bind_result methods on the $query object with the given array, as if you had provided each element of the array as a method argument.

You may want to check the SQL statement you are having the problem with, with the code below. I ve rewritten it a bit in order to make it fully testable, since the original code depends on the statement class in your abstraction layer.

<?php

$db_host =  localhost ;
$db_user =  username ;
$db_pass =  password ;
$db_name =  database ;

$mysqli = new mysqli($db_host, $db_user, $db_pass, $db_name);

print_r(fetchRows( SELECT something from some_table WHERE some_id = ? ,  i , 1));

function traceVar($a, $b) {
    print_r(array($b => $a));
}

function fetchRows(){
        error_reporting(E_ALL+E_NOTICE);
        $args = func_get_args();
        $sql = array_shift($args);
        traceVar($sql, "Query");

        // Keep the column types for bind_param.
        // $colTypes = array_shift($args);

        // Column types were originally passed here as a second
        // argument, and stored in the statement object, I suppose.
        if (!$query = $GLOBALS[ mysqli ]->prepare($sql)){ //, $colTypes)) {
                die( Please check your sql statement : unable to prepare );
        }
        if (count($args)){
                traceVar($args, Binding params with );

                // Just a quick hack to pass references in order to
                // avoid errors.
                foreach ($args as &$v) {
                    $v = &$v;
                }

                // Replace the bindParam function of the original
                // abstraction layer.
                call_user_func_array(array($query, bind_param ), $args); // bindParam ), $args);
        }

        $query->execute();

        $meta = $query->result_metadata();
        while ($field = $meta->fetch_field()) {
                $params[] = &$row[$field->name];
        }
        traceVar($params, Binding results with );
        call_user_func_array(array($query,  bind_result ), $params);

        while ($query->fetch()) {
                traceVar($row, After fetch );
                $temp = array();
                foreach($row as $key => $val) {
                        $temp[$key] = $val;
                } 
                $result[] = $temp;
        }

        $meta->free();
        $query->close(); 
        //self::close_db_conn(); 
        return $result;
}

If we could choose the server at start, we could use php-mysqlnd module instead of php-mysql module for PHP. (Or some of you maybe already using it, run "phpinfo();" and search for "mysqlnd") :

public function fetchRows(){
    ...
    $query->execute();

    $res = $query->get_result();
    while (($row = $res->fetch_assoc()))
        $result[] = $row;
    return $result;
    }
}

That seems simpler to me.