print STDOUT "BLOB is: @$SERVICE_SPECIFIC_DATA_V\n";
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Long time since I tried answering a PM question, so apologies for the likely off-baseness of it. But I was drawn to it because I sense I'll be needing to do the same thing.

Have you tried dereferencing the returned value?

I've always been terrible at this, but the snippet from http://perlmeme.org/howtos/using_perl/dereferencing.html helped me in the past:

    #!/usr/bin/perl
    use strict;
    use warnings;

    my $array_ref = ['apple', 'banana', 'orange'];
    my @array = @$array_ref;

    print "Reference: $array_ref\n";
    print "Dereferenced: @array\n";
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The documentation of recent versions does not have a fetchrow method anymore; but rather fetchrow_arrayref (returns an array-ref), fetchrow_array (returns an array) or fetchrow_hashref (returns a hash-ref).

If you replace your fetchrow call by fetchrow_array and assign the result to an array, you will find the data directly in the array and you do not need to dereference it.

Probably the old fetchrow is now silently aliased to fetchrow_arrayref.

Maybe this will help:

Have fun!

fetchrow() returns a row (an array). You probably want $SERVICE_SPECIFIC_DATA_V[0] since you are only returning one field in your select.

Start by using Data::Dumper to print what the $SERVICE_SPECIFIC_DATA_V variable actually contains.   You want to know, first of all, if this is, in fact, the XML data that you seek.   (A bit odd that it is an array, but let’s first find out what’s in it.   If it turns out to be XML, you’re in gravy.)

When you say, “invoke the BLOB as XML,” I really can’t anticipate what you mean by the word, “invoke.”   Nor, when you say “print it on my screen,” exactly what you have in mind.   Please clarify ...

XSLT is a standard technique for extracting data from XML and formatting it ... without programming.   XML::LibXML is a full-featured Perl package which uses an industry-standard library to do “everything XML.”   (There’s a very good chance that the library which it uses, libxml2, is the same one that was used to prepare the document you now have.)   Note that there are tools, commercial and otherwise, which can handle the entire task of getting XML from a database or other repository and formatting it to your taste.   (Online documentation, and all of the O’Reily books ... the ones with animals on the cover ... is prepared in just that way.)

The same library provides an excellent way for retrieving data from an XML document:   XPath expressions.   (This is a key technology in XSLT, too.)   You do not have to write a Perl program whose logic follows that of the XML document structure, in order to efficiently retrieve anything-you-want from that document.

(Now, if the XML document is so damned humongous that you can’t process it all at one time, there are other Perl packages that are specifically designed for that edge-case.   But I doubt that this is the issue here.)