DP-300 Auto-failover groups Practice Question
You are designing a disaster recovery plan for an Azure SQL Database that uses the Business Critical tier. The database is deployed in the West US region. You need to ensure that if the entire West US region becomes unavailable, the database can be failed over to a secondary region with minimal data loss. What should you implement?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often choose active geo-replication, thinking it offers lower RPO because it is a dedicated replication feature. However, both active geo-replication and auto-failover groups use asynchronous replication with similar RPO (typically less than 5 seconds). The key advantage of auto-failover groups is automatic failover and the ability to group multiple databases, making them more suitable for region-level disaster recovery with minimal data loss.
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
✓
Configure an auto-failover group with a readable secondary in East US
Auto-failover groups with a readable secondary in East US provide automatic and manual failover capabilities. For Business Critical tier, the secondary is readable and uses asynchronous replication, typically achieving an RPO of 5 seconds or less. This meets the requirement for minimal data loss. Active geo-replication also uses asynchronous replication with similar RPO but requires manual failover and does not support automatic failover. Zone redundancy protects against within-region failures, not regional outages. Geo-restore has a higher RPO and requires manual 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.
- ✗
Configure active geo-replication to East US
Why it's wrong here
Active geo-replication replicates to a readable secondary in another region asynchronously, so you might lose a few seconds of transactions on a regional outage. Unlike an auto-failover group, it does not provide automatic failover—you must manually initiate the promotion of the secondary, which adds human latency to RTO and allows transaction loss to grow while you are detecting the outage and deciding to fail over. Auto-failover groups with a grace period can trigger automatically and minimize data loss, making them superior for a DR plan.
- ✓
Configure an auto-failover group with a readable secondary in East US
Why this is correct
Auto-failover group with a readable secondary uses asynchronous replication but provides automatic failover. You can configure a grace period to minimize data loss, making it the best option for minimal data loss and automatic recovery.
- ✗
Enable zone redundancy for the database
Why it's wrong here
Zone redundancy for Azure SQL Database copies database replicas across availability zones in the same region, providing high availability against datacenter-level failures. However, it does nothing for a complete regional outage because all zones reside within the same geography and share common regional boundaries. This is an HA feature, not a DR feature, so it cannot meet the requirement of failing over to a different region like East US.
- ✗
Configure geo-restore from the West US database
Why it's wrong here
Geo-restore leverages geo-redundant backups stored in Azure paired regions, but backups are captured periodically—typically every 5 to 10 minutes for transaction logs and hourly for full/differential backups. This means the recovery point objective (RPO) can be as high as several hours or even days, and the restore is entirely manual, requiring you to create a new database from the backup. It is a last-resort DR option for regional outages, not a solution for minimizing data loss or achieving automatic recovery.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Configuring Disaster Recovery for Azure SQL
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
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