DP-300 Plan and implement data platform resources Practice Question
You are the Azure DBA for a global e-commerce company. The company uses Azure SQL Database for its product catalog. The database is in the Business Critical tier with 16 vCores and 1 TB of storage. During a major sales event, the application experiences severe performance degradation. Analysis reveals that the database is experiencing high write latency on the secondary replicas due to heavy read workload routed to them. The primary replica is not overloaded. The application uses read-only routing to direct queries to readable secondaries. The DBA needs to reduce write latency on the secondaries without affecting the read workload or incurring additional cost. What should the DBA do?
⚠ Common exam trap
Test-takers frequently assume adding more replicas or changing tiers is necessary, when the real solution is to selectively route read traffic away from secondaries to reduce contention on the log apply process without incurring cost.
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
✓
Disable read-scale out for non-critical queries and use the primary for read-write
Disabling read-scale out for non-critical queries forces those queries to use the primary replica, reducing the read workload on the secondaries. This directly lowers the write latency on secondaries, as fewer reads compete for resources with the log apply process. The change does not affect the read workload for critical queries that still use read-only routing, and it incurs no additional cost.
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 the service tier to Hyperscale to offload writes
Why it's wrong here
Hyperscale has different architecture but may increase cost and not directly solve write latency on secondaries.
- ✓
Disable read-scale out for non-critical queries and use the primary for read-write
Why this is correct
Reducing read load on secondaries decreases write latency on replicas.
- ✗
Add more replicas to distribute the read load
Why it's wrong here
Adding replicas increases cost and may increase write latency due to more replication.
- ✗
Remove the secondary replicas and use only the primary
Why it's wrong here
This reduces high availability and read capacity.
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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