Good thoughts. I do have Perl 5.8, but I don't know the answer to your question. However, I did look in the perldocs and found the "perlunicode" section, accessible by doing
at a command prompt. You might find some useful info in there.
If you don't find a good answer here, you should post your question on the Perl DBI mailing list - I'm pretty sure someone would be able to help you there.