DBI versions before 1.654 for Perl incorrectly treat numeric values as strings in sql_type_cast_svpv. When casting to SQL_NUMERIC, sql_type_cast_svpv passes the string pointer and length of the SV to grok_number without stringifying it first. An integer (IV) or floating-point (NV) value has no valid string pointer, so grok_number reads from an invalid address, triggering a segmentation fault. This is reachable in Perl using the sql_type_cast function: my $num = 42; DBI::sql_type_cast( $num, DBI::SQL_NUMERIC, 0 );