No - to me, that does not sound overkill. But that is because I try to avoid IPC in Perl and want to be able to easily audit what the children are doing, and what jobs came when. Also, I like the scalability that a database-based IPC mechanism provides - you can quickly add new machines to the setup which take their jobs from the database.

You said The hard part seems to be communicating with children, and I tell you a way that makes it trivially easy to communicate with the children, without any ugly interlocking problems and race conditions because of how (SQL) databases work. If you don't want to use what I propose feel free to do so, but don't dismiss it as unusable, as it is easy to implement.