Courseiva

DP-300 Practice Question: Plan and configure a high availability and disaster recovery environment

You are planning a disaster recovery strategy for an Azure SQL Database that supports a critical application. The database is 500 GB in size and you need to recover it within 1 hour (RTO) with a maximum data loss of 5 minutes (RPO). Which Azure SQL Database feature should you use?

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 to a secondary server in a paired region.

Active geo-replication provides asynchronous replication with an RPO of a few seconds to a few minutes, and failover can be initiated manually within minutes, meeting the RTO and RPO. Option A is wrong because point-in-time restore does not provide a separate secondary region. Option B is wrong because long-term retention is for archival, not DR. Option C is wrong because failover groups use geo-replication but the RPO is still asynchronous; the question asks for the feature, and geo-replication is the core.

Answer analysis

Option-by-option breakdown

For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.

  • Long-term retention (LTR) backups.

    Why it's wrong here

    LTR is for archival retention beyond 35 days, not for DR with low RTO/RPO.

  • Point-in-time restore (PITR) with geo-redundant backup storage.

    Why it's wrong here

    PITR can take hours to restore a large database and does not meet the RTO of 1 hour.

  • Auto-failover group with a secondary in a different region.

    Why it's wrong here

    Auto-failover groups use geo-replication; the underlying feature is geo-replication.

  • Active geo-replication to a secondary server in a paired region.

    Why this is correct

    Active geo-replication offers low RPO (seconds to minutes) and fast failover, meeting the requirements.

Go deeper

Related to this question

About these practice questions

Courseiva writes every DP-300 question from scratch — 906 in total, each with an explanation and a wrong-answer breakdown. None are copied from real exams or dumps. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →

How Courseiva writes practice questions · Editorial policy

JA

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.