1. You don't need anything extra special to read 1MB chunks of a file at a time, the read function can do that quite easily.
2. If you use placeholders in your SQL (and you always always always should whenever possible), you never have to worry about special/dangerous characters in the data you're inserting into the DB.

Here's a little demo that reads 1MB at a time, and inserts it into the DB using placeholders.

open my $fh, 'big-binary-data.file'
    or die "Couldn't open file: $!";

# prepares an SQL statement with data to be filled in later
my $sql = "insert into table set chunk_num=?, data=?";
my $sth = $dbh->prepare($sql) or die "Couldn't prepare sql statement: 
+$!";

my $chunk_num = 0;
my $chunk_size = 1024 * 1024;

while ( read( $fh, my $buffer, $chunk_size ) ) {
  $chunk_num++;

  # executes the statement with the appropriate data filled in
  $sth->execute( $chunk_num, $buffer )
    or die "Couldn't insert data: $!";
}

$sth->finish;
[download]

blokhead

You can read a file in fixed-length chunks by setting $/ to a reference to an integer

{
    use bytes;
    local $/ = \1048576;
    open my $fh, '<', 'bigfile.bin' or die $!;
    while (<$fh>) {
        # stuff the db
    }
}
[download]

After Compline,
Zaxo

You can find the method you're looking for at Handling huge BLOB fields with DBI and MySQL, in our Tutorials.

It contains explanations and a full example for uploading and downloading an oversized file into BLOB fields.

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Thanks for that. I did try searching the monastery but sometimes a little help is needed to find the gold nuggets in the cloisters.

Cheers again