DP-300 Practice Question: Monitor, configure, and optimize database resources
You are monitoring an Azure SQL Database that is running a mission-critical workload. You notice that the DTU consumption is consistently above 90% during peak hours. You need to recommend a solution to reduce the DTU consumption. What should you recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently confuse high DTU consumption with a need for high availability or read scaling, but the correct response is to increase resource capacity via scaling up.
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
✓
Scale up to a higher service tier or increase DTUs
When DTU consumption consistently exceeds 90%, the database is resource-constrained, leading to performance degradation. Scaling up to a higher service tier or increasing DTUs directly provides more CPU, memory, and I/O resources, alleviating the bottleneck and reducing DTU utilization percentage. This is the standard corrective action for sustained high DTU usage in Azure SQL Database.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Scale up to a higher service tier or increase DTUs
Why this is correct
Scaling up raises the provisioned compute ceiling, so the same workload consumes a smaller proportion of available DTUs. This directly satisfies the stem's constraint of sustained consumption above 90% during peak hours, where the database is genuinely resource-bound rather than suffering from inefficient queries or missing indexes.
- ✗
Scale down to a lower service tier
Why it's wrong here
Scaling down reduces the DTU ceiling available, so consumption above 90% would saturate the lower tier and throttle the mission-critical workload further. Reducing DTU consumption requires tuning queries or indexing. Scaling down suits over-provisioned databases running well below capacity.
- ✗
Enable geo-replication
Why it's wrong here
Geo-replication copies the database to a secondary region for disaster recovery; it does not reduce DTU consumption on the primary, since every write is still executed there. It is tempting because it improves availability and read offload, but the stem asks about lowering DTU load, which requires scaling the service tier or optimising queries.
- ✗
Enable read scale-out
Why it's wrong here
Read scale-out routes read-only workloads to secondary replicas, but writes still consume DTUs on the primary, so peak DTU consumption is not reduced. It suits read-heavy reporting offload, not a workload whose primary DTU usage must fall. Query tuning or indexing addresses the actual consumption.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Managing Environment Configurations and Resource Governance
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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