DP-300 Plan and implement data platform resources Practice Question
A DBA needs to create a new Azure SQL Database and wants to ensure that the database automatically fails over to a secondary region without manual intervention. The recovery point objective (RPO) is 5 seconds. What should the DBA configure?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse 'standard geo-replication' with 'active geo-replication with failover group,' assuming both support automatic failover, but only the latter provides the automatic, policy-driven failover required for zero manual intervention.
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
✓
Active geo-replication with failover group
Active geo-replication with a failover group is the correct choice because it provides automatic, customer-managed failover to a secondary region with an RPO of 5 seconds. The failover group orchestrates the failover of multiple databases simultaneously and supports automatic failover policies, meeting the requirement for zero manual intervention. Standard geo-replication does not support automatic failover, and other options do not provide cross-region disaster recovery.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Active geo-replication with failover group
Why this is correct
Active geo-replication with a failover group is correct because it links an Azure SQL Database to a secondary in a different region and automatically fails over the primary and secondary endpoints when the failover group's health policy detects an outage, within a configurable grace period. The asynchronous replication maintains an RPO of up to 5 seconds, and the failover group manages the DNS endpoint so applications are redirected to the new primary without manual intervention or code changes. Note that the replication is asynchronous, not synchronous, meaning the 5-second RPO is a lag target rather than a zero-data-loss guarantee.
- ✗
Standard geo-replication
Why it's wrong here
Standard geo-replication creates an asynchronous secondary database on another server and region, but it does not provide any automatic failover: the DBA must manually issue ALTER DATABASE ... FAILOVER or use the portal to promote the secondary. Because the stated requirement is zero manual intervention, this offering is disqualified, and it also lacks the listener/endpoint abstraction that failover groups provide, so connection strings cannot automatically switch to the new primary.
- ✗
Local redundancy with automatic failover
Why it's wrong here
Local redundancy with automatic failover, such as Azure SQL Database's built-in high availability within a single region, detects local replica failures and reroutes connections to a healthy replica, but it does not replicate data to a different geographic location. In a regional outage, the entire Azure SQL Database becomes unavailable because all replicas reside in the same region, so this option cannot satisfy the requirement for cross-region disaster recovery.
- ✗
Read-scale out
Why it's wrong here
Read-scale out creates a read-only replica in the Premium or Business Critical service tier to offload reporting and analytics traffic, but the replica is never writeable and has no failover or promotion mechanism. It cannot act as a disaster recovery target because it does not maintain an independently replicated copy of the database in another region and cannot take over the primary role under any circumstance.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Overview of Azure Data Platform Options
Key term
Azure SQL Performance Tuning
Azure SQL Performance Tuning is the process of optimizing the speed and efficiency of queries and database operations in Microsoft Azure SQL Database or SQL Managed Instance to reduce latency and improve throughput.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DP-300 practice question is part of Courseiva's free Microsoft certification practice question bank. Courseiva provides original exam-style practice questions with explanations, topic-based practice, mock exams, readiness tracking, and study analytics to help learners prepare for the DP-300 exam.