Oracle 10g, Stored Procedures and Perl's Internal UTF8 Flag

[Alan Seegmiller]

DBD::Oracle 1.16
Oracle 10g (client 10.1.0.3)
Red Hat Enterprise Linux ES release 3 (Taroon Update 3)
Perl 5.8.6 (multithreaded disabled)
NLS_LANG="AMERICAN_AMERICA.AL32UTF8";
NLS_NCHAR="AL32UTF8"

I have found on my system that when I execute a SQL select statement,
that the strings returned have Perl's internal utf8 flag turned on, as
expected.

However, if the same data selected is done via a stored procedure, the
strings returned have their internal utf8 flag turned off.  What I can
then do is use _utf8_on in the Encode module to turn the flag on, but
of course I would rather not have to.

Are there other users with similiar set-ups successfully returning
utf8 strings from Oracle via stored procedures and there is a problem
with my set-up?  Or have I stumbled upon something else?

An example of my test script is below.

(I'm in the process of upgrading from Oracle 8i and DBD::Oracle 1.12)

Thanks,
Alan

#!/usr/bin/perl

use strict;
use DBI;
use DBD::Oracle;
use Encode qw( encode_utf8 is_utf8 _utf8_on);

$ENV{NLS_LANG}="AMERICAN_AMERICA.AL32UTF8";
$ENV{NLS_NCHAR}="AL32UTF8";

my $dbh = DBI->connect(
                       "dbi:Oracle:host=10.33.80.10;sid=DBSID",
                       "name",
                       "pass", 
                       { AutoCommit => 1 ,RaiseError => 1 }
                      );

my $sth = $dbh->prepare("SELECT message FROM test WHERE id=1");
$sth->execute();
my $string = $sth->fetchrow_array;

my $string_p;
$sth = $dbh->prepare("BEGIN P_TEST.GET_MESSAGE(:1); END;");
$sth->bind_param_inout(1, \$string_p, 100);
$sth->execute();

print "UTF Test on Select String: ".is_utf8($string)."\n";
print "UTF Test on Procedure String:  ".is_utf8($string_p)."\n\n";

print "TURNING ON UTF8 FLAG\n";
_utf8_on($string_p);
print "UTF Test on Procedure String:  ".is_utf8($string_p)."\n\n";