UNIX for Advanced & Expert Users

I am trying to upload a file to a SQL database table. The column type is IMAGE. I am looking for a solution to upload a word doc file. I tried 3 approaches.

1) my $fileToStore = "mytest.doc";
open IPFILE, "<", $name;
binmode IPFILE;
while (<IPFILE>)
{
$fileToStore .= $_;
}
close IPFILE;

#then pass $fileToStore as a parameter to procedure.

2) use File::BLOB;

my $name = "mytest.doc";

my $file = File::BLOB->from_file($name);
my $fileToStore = $file->freeze;



3) use Stream::FileInputStream;

my $name = "mytest.doc";

my $file = FileInputStream->new($name);
my $fileToStore = $file->readAll();



None of the approaches are working for binary doc file. They are working fine for txt files. Am I missing something?
I tried few more things like $fileToStore = unpack ("C*", $fileToStore); but to no avail.

Unfortunately the version of perl on Dev is old and does not support encoding. Could you please help us out?

Unless your image is really small, your DB would run faster if you just stored your images in your file system and stored links to the files in the database...that might be the easiest option too.