For your situation here are some of the reasons I'd use to push for perl.

• Perl has a well-defined DB interface layer, DBI. DBI is database indepandant so if you ever decide to switch to another DB, you can do it with almost no changes to your scripts.
• w/ apache, mod_perl and Apache::DBI you get cached DB handles, so your scripts aren't constantly disconnecting and reconnecting to the DB server (which can really hurt performance)
• w/ apache and mod_perl (and optionally Apache::Registry, depending on how you want to do things) your scripts can run inside the web server; this is much faster use no separate process has to be forked.
• Perl is generally better suited for CGI's because it has a well defined CGI variable parsing library.
• If you need to do some C stuff you can always use Inline to put C code inline in your Perl programs.

Originally posted as a Categorized Answer.