perl 5.8.8 installation

Dear List
I have one sun solaris machine which has installed perl 5.6.1. the details
of machine is as follows

SunOS MARS 5.9 Generic_118558-09 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-V440

Now I want to install perl 5.8.8 in this machine. Since the machine is a
production server I need to very careful about the upgradation of perl. Now
my question if i want to upgrade to perl 5.8.8 is there any chance of data
loss and how do I upgrade it i.e. from 5.6.1 to 5.8.8 ? what are the steps
for this upgradation procedure ???

Thanks & Regards in advance
Anirban Adhikary.