The next version of DBD:AnyData will support embedded newlines. For now you can use DBD::CSV instead which uses the same SQL engine as DBD::AnyData and already supports embedded newlines and works fine with tab. Another option is to stick with DBD::AnyData but redefine the eol (end of line) to something other than "\n". For example, on windows, this script creates an queries a tab-separated file containing fields with embedded newlines:

#!perl -w
use strict;
use DBI;
my $dbh=DBI->connect('dbi:AnyData(RaiseError=1):');
$dbh->ad_catalog( 'test'
                , 'CSV'
                , 'newline.csv'
                , {sep_char=>"\t",eol=>"\015"}
                );
my %sql = ( drop   => 'DROP TABLE test'
          , create => 'CREATE TABLE test (id INT, phrase VARCHAR(30))'
          , insert => 'INSERT INTO test VALUES(?,?)'
          , query  => 'SELECT * FROM test'
          );
my $insert = $dbh->prepare( $sql{insert} );
my $query  = $dbh->prepare( $sql{query} );

eval {  $dbh->do( $sql{drop} ) };
$dbh->do( $sql{create} );
$insert->execute(1,"foo\n\nbar");
$insert->execute(2,'baz');
$query->execute;
while (my $row=$query->fetch) {
    print "[$_] " for @$row;
    print "~\n";
}
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