DP-300 Configure and manage automation of tasks Practice Question
You manage an Azure SQL Database that is part of a failover group. You need to automate the failover to the secondary region in the event of a disaster. Which approach 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
✓
Configure the auto-failover group to automatically fail over.
Auto-failover groups are designed to automatically fail over to the secondary region in the event of a disaster, providing built-in automation. Option C is incorrect because while an Azure Automation runbook could be used to initiate a failover manually, it is redundant since the auto-failover group already handles automatic failover. Options B and D are incorrect because elastic jobs are for management tasks like data consistency, and SQL Server Agent is not available 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.
- ✓
Configure the auto-failover group to automatically fail over.
Why this is correct
Auto-failover groups replicate databases to a secondary region and trigger failover automatically when the primary becomes unavailable, without manual intervention. This satisfies the disaster-recovery automation requirement, since the group's policy initiates the regional switch based on outage detection rather than operator action.
- ✗
Schedule a failover using elastic jobs.
Why it's wrong here
Elastic jobs run T-SQL against Azure SQL databases on a schedule; they cannot initiate a geo-failover, which is a control-plane operation. It is tempting because elastic jobs are the Azure SQL Database scheduling equivalent of Agent jobs, but failover requires the failover group's own policy or management API.
- ✗
Create an Azure Automation runbook that initiates the failover.
Why it's wrong here
A runbook can call the failover API, but Azure Automation requires a schedule or alert trigger, adding orchestration the failover group already provides natively. It is tempting as general Azure automation, yet the built-in auto-failover policy handles disaster failover without custom runbooks.
- ✗
Use a SQL Server Agent job to trigger failover.
Why it's wrong here
SQL Server Agent does not exist in Azure SQL Database, so no job can be created there. It is tempting because Agent jobs are the familiar on-premises SQL Server scheduling mechanism, but Azure SQL Database offers no Agent service; elastic jobs or Automation would be needed instead.
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.