I just encountered this same problem. It appears to be an issue with DBD::ODBC itself. You can patch dbdimp.c and rebuild your Perl module and that should fix it. Here's a diff against DBD::ODBC 1.16: 
(root@ravyn 16:40:05)# diff dbdimp.c ~root/dbdimp.new.c 
1897d1896
<           case SQL_VARBINARY:
1933a1933,1940
>           case SQL_VARBINARY:
>           fbh->ftype = SQL_C_BINARY;
>         case SQL_VARCHAR:
>         case SQL_WVARCHAR:
>           if (fbh->ColDef == 0) {
>             fbh->ColDisplaySize = DBIc_LongReadLen(imp_sth);
>           }
>           break;

[download]
Credit goes to Fumiaki Yoshimatsu for solving the problem a couple years ago (I found the solution on Google) - not sure why it's not in the mainline DBD::ODBC code, but it works well enough for my applications, so I'm not complaining.

In reply to Re: dbix::simple & varbinary(MAX) by Anonymous Monk
in thread dbix::simple & varbinary(MAX) by Lyndley

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