I don't know how to configure Access, but perhaps I can help a bit nonetheless.

Most databases are stored in one character encoding, which is defined in the database configuration (normally per database).

If you use DBI from perl, it usually just returns the bytes that the databases emit. Some drivers (like DBD::Pg and DBD::mysql) have options that take care of automatic decoding, which means that DBI calls will return text strings rather than byte strings.

If your DBD:: module doesn't support that, you have to use Encode to handle the character encodings yourself.