Deal possessors of Perl Wisdom!

Please advice on my hopefully simple following question.

Modern perls have an "UTF8" flag attached for each scalar. perldoc perlunicode clearly states this.
There are functions to convert to/from utf8 in place, and there are functions that just set on or off "UTF8" flag

But how do I distinguish whether or not should I treat a data as Unicode returned from some C library?

As an example, sssume I had few scalars written into database, some of them just binary data, some are Unicode, and after that I get my scalars back from DB. How do I distinguish which is simply binary and which is Unicode?

Should I always store "utf8-ness" information always with my scalars?
Is there exists a better and cleaner way?

Thanks in advance,
Courage, the Cowardly Dog

In reply to How to recognize Unicode data received from any C library? by Courage

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