DP-300 Plan and implement data platform resources Practice Question
You are a database administrator for a global e-commerce company. The company runs a critical transactional workload on an Azure SQL Managed Instance (MI) in the West US region. The database is approximately 1 TB in size and uses the Business Critical tier with zone redundancy enabled. The application requires read latency for reporting queries to be under 10 ms. The company is expanding to Europe and needs to deploy a secondary copy of the database in the North Europe region to serve read-only reporting traffic for European users. The secondary must be kept in sync with the primary with a recovery point objective (RPO) of less than 5 seconds. Additionally, the solution must support automatic failover if the primary region becomes unavailable. You need to design the disaster recovery and read scaling solution. Which approach should you take?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many candidates confuse geo-replication (which requires manual failover) with auto-failover groups (which support automatic failover and readable secondaries), or they may overlook that transactional replication cannot meet the strict RPO requirement due to asynchronous nature and potential lag.
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
✓
Create an auto-failover group with the primary in West US and add a readable secondary in North Europe, using synchronous commit
Azure SQL Managed Instance supports auto-failover groups with a readable secondary in a paired region. By configuring synchronous commit within the failover group, you achieve an RPO of less than 5 seconds (typically 0-2 seconds) while the secondary in North Europe can serve read-only traffic with low latency. The auto-failover group also provides automatic failover if the primary region becomes unavailable, meeting both the read scaling and disaster recovery requirements.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Create a geo-replica of the MI in North Europe and manually failover when needed
Why it's wrong here
Geo-replica does not automatically support low-latency reads and automatic failover.
- ✗
Deploy a separate managed instance in North Europe and use transactional replication to keep it in sync
Why it's wrong here
Transactional replication does not guarantee RPO < 5 seconds and does not support automatic failover.
- ✓
Create an auto-failover group with the primary in West US and add a readable secondary in North Europe, using synchronous commit
Why this is correct
This meets all requirements.
- ✗
Create an auto-failover group with the primary in West US and secondary in North Europe, but do not make the secondary readable
Why it's wrong here
Without readable secondary, read queries cannot be offloaded.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Overview of Azure Data Platform Options
Key term
Azure SQL Managed Instance
Azure SQL Managed Instance is a fully managed cloud database service that gives you nearly all the features of Microsoft SQL Server on your own server, without you having to manage the hardware or operating system.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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