It might be a great idea but I cannot judge that based on the information you provide. I don’t know what the Perl scripts are doing and why they communicate. I would just like to say that not all synchronous communication can be changed to asynchronous.

In general asynchronous messaging allows for more parallelism because of the non-blocking nature but it also introduces issues like what happens if a message cannot be delivered? Or maybe the receiver needs to return some transaction id to the sender? etc.

I have seen home grown messaging middleware developed at a time when messaging products were not available. Nowadays I would take an existing product rather than reinventing wheels. Dedicated Message Oriented Middleware normally takes care of much of the complexity.

If Oracle AQ is available at no extra cost why not give it a try? I read up on Oracle AQ, and it is implemented in database tables (your option 3).

Cheers,
dHarry