1. You don't need anything extra special to read 1MB chunks of a file at a time, the read function can do that quite easily.
2. If you use placeholders in your SQL (and you always always always should whenever possible), you never have to worry about special/dangerous characters in the data you're inserting into the DB.

Here's a little demo that reads 1MB at a time, and inserts it into the DB using placeholders.

open my $fh, 'big-binary-data.file'
    or die "Couldn't open file: $!";

# prepares an SQL statement with data to be filled in later
my $sql = "insert into table set chunk_num=?, data=?";
my $sth = $dbh->prepare($sql) or die "Couldn't prepare sql statement: 
+$!";

my $chunk_num = 0;
my $chunk_size = 1024 * 1024;

while ( read( $fh, my $buffer, $chunk_size ) ) {
  $chunk_num++;

  # executes the statement with the appropriate data filled in
  $sth->execute( $chunk_num, $buffer )
    or die "Couldn't insert data: $!";
}

$sth->finish;
[download]

This should give you a decent starting place. I highly recommend reading the database tutorials here on PM (as well as the DBI documentation) if you're a little unsure of what placeholders do. After understanding them, you will quickly realize their usefulness.

blokhead