Episode 8. AWS RDS gap. Day 8 of your 10 day sprint.

Welcome. This episode turns your thinnest area into an honesty asset. Interviewers forgive gaps they can plan around; they punish bluffing.

Say your gap line once, exactly: My gap is hands-on AWS-native depth versus Oracle internals, and I am closing it with DMS, RDS, and CloudWatch labs in this plan.

Concepts. RDS for Oracle is managed but engine-familiar; EC2 self-hosted Oracle keeps DataGuard and OS control. DMS does full load plus CDC logical replication and needs primary keys plus source logging, just like GoldenGate capture. CloudWatch alarms plus Performance Insights replace OEM for managed metrics; Splunk or Datadog carry audit and app-side signals. Aurora and Postgres are the likely landing zones.

Scenario. Design the migration path for one Oracle schema to RDS. Understand: size, dependencies, downtime tolerance. Prepare: SCT-style compat notes, key coverage, logging state. Identify: DMS full plus CDC versus one-shot export; pick by downtime window. Support: rehearse cutover with a rollback trigger, then monitor with CloudWatch lag and error alarms.

Say this bridge once. Say: DMS is logical and needs keys and source logging, the same prerequisites I enforce for GoldenGate, so my migration discipline transfers on day one.

Your Day 8 lab: fill the DMS prereqs checklist for one schema and map three CloudWatch alarms to their Oracle equivalents.
Teaser: Tomorrow, Episode 9, compliance plus Agile. Audit lines and the change-control reframe.

Second scenario. RDS versus EC2 for a DataGuard-heavy workload. Understand: HA promises and OS access needs. Prepare: managed failover behavior plus license and patch constraints. Identify: managed standby sufficiency versus custom DG requirement; recommend by control need. Support: document the decision with its trade-off stated aloud.

Pause and say the gap line again. Honest, specific, with a plan. That is what earns trust.

Close with your intro spine. Ninety seconds. Done.