Weird problem with Oracle, DBI, and Scientific Notation

vroom has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

When I do a straight up select from a table in Oracle from SQL-Plus I get my number returned in scientific notation.

select large_number from mytable;

LARGE_NUMBER
------------
4.1142E+11
[download]

when what I want is something like: 411420431014 Easy enough to fix in theory with TO_CHAR:

select to_char(large_number) from mytable;

LARGE_NUMBER
------------
411420431014
[download]

Or somewhat more explicitly with a number format:

select to_char(large_number,'999999999999') from mytable;

LARGE_NUMBER
------------
411420431014
[download]

These both return what I want. However when I run the queries with Perl and DBI I get my number back in scientific notation?

Anyone got a clue on this?