AZ-305 Design business continuity solutions Practice Question
A company runs an Azure SQL Database with active geo-replication configured to a secondary region. The primary region experiences a complete outage. The company needs to promote the secondary database to become the new primary with minimal data loss. Which action should they take?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse 'Failover' (which in Azure SQL Database can mean either planned or forced depending on context) with the specific 'Forced failover' action required during a disaster, leading them to select the ambiguous 'Failover' option instead.
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Forced failover
Forced failover is the correct action because it immediately promotes the secondary database to primary without waiting for synchronization, which is necessary during a complete primary region outage. This option minimizes data loss by accepting any unsynchronized data at the secondary, prioritizing availability over consistency. In contrast, planned failover requires synchronous data transfer and fails if the primary is unreachable.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Forced failover
Why this is correct
Forced failover is the appropriate action when the primary Azure SQL Database experiences a complete outage and is unreachable. This mechanism immediately promotes the secondary database to become the new primary, ensuring rapid recovery. While active geo-replication is asynchronous and some data loss is inherent if the primary cannot send its final transactions, a forced failover uses the most up-to-date data available on the secondary. This directly satisfies the requirement for minimal data loss by prioritising immediate availability with the latest replicated data.
- ✗
Planned failover
Why it's wrong here
Planned failover is designed for maintenance windows where the primary and secondary are both fully connected. It synchronously flushes all remaining transactions to the secondary before promotion, guaranteeing zero data loss, but this handshake requires the primary to be reachable. In a complete outage, the primary is unreachable, so the planned failover cannot actually complete and will fail or hang, making it unusable for disaster recovery.
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Enable geo-replication
Why it's wrong here
Enabling geo-replication creates a new asynchronous read-only replica of the database on a secondary server; it is the initial setup step that establishes continuous data movement from primary to secondary. It does not promote the secondary to become the writable primary, so it performs no failover whatsoever. Since active geo-replication is already running in this scenario, invoking this action is redundant and does nothing to restore availability during an outage.
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Failover
Why it's wrong here
The term 'failover' alone is ambiguous in Azure SQL Database because there are two distinct operations: planned failover (zero data loss) and forced failover (unplanned, allows data loss). In the Azure portal and CLI, the specific action for an outage is labeled 'Forced Failover' to distinguish it from the planned variant. Selecting a generic 'failover' could trigger the planned path, which requires the primary to be online and will not succeed during a complete outage, so it does not clearly satisfy the recovery requirement.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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