Plan and configure a high availability and disaster recovery environment →hardMultiple ChoiceObjective-mapped
DP-300 Auto-failover groups Practice Question
You are the database administrator for a global e-commerce company. The company uses Azure SQL Database in the Business Critical service tier for its transactional database, db1, hosted in the East US region. The database is 500 GB and experiences high write throughput. The current disaster recovery solution uses active geo-replication to a secondary in West US, but during a recent failover drill, the failover took 45 seconds, exceeding the corporate RTO of 30 seconds. The RPO requirement is zero data loss. You need to improve the failover time while maintaining zero data loss. The secondary must be in a different Azure region for compliance. What should you do?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common trap is assuming auto-failover groups provide synchronous geo-replication. In reality, they use asynchronous replication, so zero data loss is not guaranteed across regions.
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 between East US and West US using zone-redundant deployment within each region and ensure the secondary is zone-redundant.
None of the provided options fully satisfy both requirements: zero data loss (RPO=0) and failover time under 30 seconds across regions. Auto-failover groups (Option C) use asynchronous replication across regions, so RPO is not zero. General Purpose tier (Option B) also uses async replication. Increasing replicas (Option A) does not affect failover time. Hyperscale with named replicas (Option D) does not support cross-region failover. To achieve zero data loss across regions, an alternative solution such as SQL Server on Azure VMs with an availability group or Azure SQL Managed Instance with a distributed availability group would be required.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Increase the number of replicas in the Business Critical tier to 5.
Why it's wrong here
Increasing the number of replicas in the Business Critical tier improves read scale but does not reduce failover time or affect replication across regions.
- ✗
Change the secondary to a General Purpose tier and use async replication.
Why it's wrong here
Changing to General Purpose tier with async replication would increase RPO beyond zero, violating the zero data loss requirement.
- ✓
Configure an auto-failover group between East US and West US using zone-redundant deployment within each region and ensure the secondary is zone-redundant.
Why this is correct
Auto-failover groups use asynchronous replication across regions, so they cannot guarantee zero data loss (RPO=0). While they can achieve failover times under 30 seconds, the RPO requirement is not met.
- ✗
Move both primary and secondary to Hyperscale tier and use named replicas.
Why it's wrong here
Hyperscale tier with named replicas does not support synchronous geo-replication for zero data loss and is not designed for cross-region failover.
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.
Key term
Azure SQL Managed Instance
Azure SQL Managed Instance is a fully managed cloud database service that gives you nearly all the features of Microsoft SQL Server on your own server, without you having to manage the hardware or operating system.
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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.