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.