trial and error brings results, but seems sub-optimal. Specifally, I tried lots of other things before finding that SQL_DECIMAL allows 9223372036854775807 to enter into Perl as a string rather than as 9.blahblahblahe+18. (useing sqlite.)
Are these things driver-specific or are there sane fallbacks? For instance, SQL_BIGINT might have gotten mapped to SQL_DECIMAL for this driver.