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Perl Unicode Forensics

Are character encodings and environment incompatibilities messing with the your data? Why it happens and what to do about it. 
A SOAP message is delivered to an Apache server which runs a SOAP::Lite powered Perl CGI script that acts as the SOAP server. The script interacts with Ingres, reading and inserting data. Both Perl and Ingres are fined tuned to speak iso8859/7 Greek.
The issue was that the same CGI script produced different results when run under different servers. In the first case the Greek characters sent by the client and consumed by the server are getting into the database as they should do, while in the second case the very same data under the same workflow ends up as "garbage".That is, for example, Greek character capital A, or alpha, ends up as sequence "Γ\201".

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