I'm glad things are working, but as you have both insert and select operations happening, make sure that you can insert a new string, verify its content in the DB, and extract it again correctly. With a mixed mode like that, I would be concerned that what's working now is some data that was previously corrupted.
#11929 First ask yourself `How would I do this without a computer?' Then have the computer do it the same way.
Comment on Re^2: DBD::Oracle - Character Encoding Conversion