Tests null cases and basic functioning of sorting algorithm.

Adding the scope guard which is a way we can cause code to be executed even during a die. Very useful for non-global resource cleanup operations (finally blocks)

ENSCORESW-152. Committing the low cardinality and low row count caching framework into the core API. Implement the correct method from BaseAdaptor to have your values cached in local memory

Adding an iterator for subseqs to the Slice object. Means a lot of our code which deals with iteration of slices can delegate to this for its logic.

Additional patch to bring in version into the unique key for xref. Also apply changes to gene and transcript

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 We also had to change the intron table SQL as it was out of date.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.