4.2.2 stuck in an db upgrade loop with “Call to undefined method wpdb::get_col_length()”

I checked in mysql and the type of the column it was looking for is text and in version 5.1 of MySQL that I am using the size is 65,535 so I replaced line 1461 which was giving error with the following hardcoded size:

        $content_length = array(
                        'type'   => 'byte',
                        'length' => 65535,
                );

After that the upgrade completed fine and the site is healthy.