It really isn't any more complex, it's just that DBI and mysql wrap most of that up for you.
That's an odd definition of complexity you've got there. What would you think of the equivalent solution in assembler? Or constructed using syscall() instead of the shm*() routines? Obviously these would do the same work for you, it's just that GCC "wraps most of that up for you."
It's interesting to see that SysV semaphores perform pretty well. It doesn't match my experience with SysV shared memory, which was about as slow as just using disk, but I guess that's apples and oranges. And let's not even talk about the arbitrary kernel-level limits on this stuff (how many, how much storage, etc).... It might work great on Linux, but porting to BSD or Solaris where the defaults are much different is a guaranteed pain.
-sam