I had a similar problem with mysql.Although the format of the table was in iso-8859-7 when passing the string from the script which had the IO layers switched to 8859-7 the data was not passed in correctly.
I used the Encode module and worked.here is a the actual code

foreach $key (keys %fileindex) {
my $val = encode("iso-8859-7", $fileindex{$key});
$sth = $dbh->prepare ('INSERT INTO products4 (p_url,p_desc)
                    VALUES(?,?)');
$sth->execute ($key,$val);
$sth->finish ();
[download]

check the utf-8 flag of the Encode module maybe that helps