Using the "best" HTTP client available i.e. avoid making people install LWP if they are on a late enough version of Perl. HTTP::Tiny is very nice

New test case for applying the current release's patches. This downloads the last release of the core schema, finds all patches relevant to this release and patches the DB accordingly. The code requires access to CVSWEB and so supports proxies but can also skip the tests if the schema cannot be found. Failure of this test is not an issue for external users & so should not be punished as such

ENSCORESW-160. Committed with test cases checked in. Also manually verified the code works with transcripts (live as of v67 of Ensembl) ENST00000330803, ENST00000366472 and ENST00000318244

ENSCORESW-171. Bringing in support for splice site work. We also had to change the intron table SQL as it was out of date.

Patching issue with there being a difference between NULL and and empty string WRT description and also plugged a gap in the code when we were trying to query using a display_label which the api allows to be NULL but the DB does not

ENSCORESW-165. Committing the second attempt at the IntronSupportingEvidence API for genebuild RNASeq data.

Auto-increment IDs means we cannot guarentee/reset the DB every time so assert that we were given an id

Added efficiency boost to fetch_all_by_external_name and sub-methods. Wildcards now escaped in positions 1 and 3 unless user supplies override flag.

POD updated accordingly.

Xref table overhaul. Uniqueness enforced, coupled with insert-then-query execution order in DBEntryAdaptor.

Data patching is slow.

ENSCORESW-140. Issue caused by 1 length sequences. Fixed by changing the logic in fasta serialiser. Test cases now assert for length 1 seqs and for other potential scenarios.

ENSCORESW-137. Code could not handle empty lines nor attributes with multiple entries. Hope this isn't going to mess up anything else

[ENSCORESW-136]. Adding count methods to the API. Also triggered bug fixing of SqlHelper which was not behaving as expected. Test cases added