DP-300 Practice Question: Plan and configure high availability and disaster recovery
You are the database administrator for a global e-commerce company. They run a mission-critical application on Azure SQL Database in the Business Critical tier. The database is 2 TB and experiences high write throughput. The current setup uses an auto-failover group with a secondary in the same region (West US) for high availability. The client application uses the auto-failover group listener with ReadScale=1 to route read-only queries to the secondary. Recently, during a regional outage that affected West US, the failover to the secondary succeeded, but the application experienced significant performance degradation and many timeouts for read operations. Investigation reveals that the secondary replica was overwhelmed with read traffic after failover. The business requires an RTO of 30 seconds and RPO of 5 seconds. The application must be able to handle read-heavy workloads even during a failover. You need to recommend a solution to improve read scalability and disaster recovery without changing the application code. What should you do?
⚠ Common exam trap
Many exam-takers think adding more replicas in the same region (Option A) or scaling the secondary (Option C) solves the problem, but they fail to recognize that a regional outage requires a geographically separate replica to ensure read scalability and disaster recovery.
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
✓
Deploy an additional readable secondary replica in the Business Critical tier in a different Azure region and configure active geo-replication to that region. Update the connection string to use the geo-secondary for reads.
Deploying an additional readable secondary replica in a different Azure region via active geo-replication provides both disaster recovery and read scalability. After a regional failover, the geo-secondary can serve read traffic without overwhelming the primary, meeting the RTO of 30 seconds and RPO of 5 seconds. The application can use the geo-secondary for reads by updating the connection string, without changing application code, ensuring read-heavy workloads are handled during failover.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Add a second secondary replica to the auto-failover group in the same region.
Why it's wrong here
During a regional outage, all replicas in the same region are affected.
- ✓
Deploy an additional readable secondary replica in the Business Critical tier in a different Azure region and configure active geo-replication to that region. Update the connection string to use the geo-secondary for reads.
Why this is correct
This provides additional read capacity and disaster recovery.
- ✗
Increase the service objective of the secondary replica in the auto-failover group to a higher DTU or vCore to handle the read load.
Why it's wrong here
Scaling up does not add additional read replicas; the secondary still has limited capacity.
- ✗
Change the database to the Hyperscale tier, which supports multiple readable replicas and automatic failover.
Why it's wrong here
Hyperscale does not support auto-failover groups with the same RTO/RPO and changes the architecture.
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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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.