This whitepaper provides a clear, CTO-level assessment of whether Oracle Pluggable Databases (PDBs) are a good fit for Amazon RDS for Oracle. It highlights how Multitenant architecture—normally valuable for consolidation, faster provisioning, and simplified administration—behaves within the constraints of RDS. While AWS supports PDBs, many of Oracle’s enterprise-grade capabilities such as Data Guard, RAC, Flashback Database, and full recovery options are not available, limiting high availability, disaster recovery, and performance tuning for larger or mission-critical workloads.

The paper also outlines important operational and integration challenges, including restrictions on MAX_PDBS, SYS privileges, backup and recovery limitations, DMS configuration gaps, and RDS-specific administrative procedures. It stresses that these constraints require careful planning around licensing, migration, security, and performance to avoid unexpected roadblocks.

Ultimately, the whitepaper concludes that PDBs on RDS work well for development, testing, and lower-HA production scenarios where managed-service convenience outweighs flexibility. Enterprises needing advanced HA/DR, deeper control, or full use of Oracle’s Multitenant feature set should consider alternatives such as Oracle on EC2, Exadata Cloud@Customer, or Oracle Cloud Infrastructure.

Download the whitepaper or view the Git repository below.