DBD::Postgres 

• Create DB with UTF8 encoding
• Automatically decode returned column data to character strings:

my $attr = {
    RaiseError      => 1,
    pg_enable_utf8  => 1,
};
$dbh = DBI->connect("dbi:Pg:dbname=$dbname", $user, $pswd, $attr);

• Since DBD::Pg Version 3.0.0 this is default behaviour