DP-300 Practice Question: Plan and configure a high availability and disaster recovery environment
Your company has an Azure SQL Database with a failover group configured to a secondary region. The primary region experiences a temporary network issue. The failover group is set to automatic failover with a grace period of 1 hour. What will happen?
⚠ Common exam trap
DP-300 often tests the grace period behavior in failover groups — candidates assume automatic failover is immediate, but the grace period delays it to prevent unnecessary failovers.
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
✓
Automatic failover will start after 1 hour if the primary is still unreachable.
In an Azure SQL failover group with automatic failover and a grace period of 1 hour, the failover is not immediate. Azure waits for the grace period to elapse while the primary remains unreachable before initiating automatic failover to the secondary region. This prevents unnecessary failovers during brief network blips.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Automatic failover will happen immediately.
Why it's wrong here
Automatic failover waits out the grace period before triggering, so a one-hour grace period delays the switch rather than acting instantly. The immediate behaviour applies only when the grace period is set to zero, which is the tempting configuration for near-instant regional recovery.
- ✗
You must manually initiate failover.
Why it's wrong here
Automatic failover initiates after the one-hour grace period elapses, so manual initiation is not required. It is tempting because manual failover is the configured behaviour when automatic failover is disabled, and it would be correct if the failover policy were set to manual rather than automatic.
- ✓
Automatic failover will start after 1 hour if the primary is still unreachable.
Why this is correct
With automatic failover and a one-hour grace period, Azure waits that duration while the primary remains unreachable, then promotes the secondary. The grace period delays the switchover, so failover only begins once the hour elapses and the outage persists.
- ✗
The secondary database will be deleted and re-created.
Why it's wrong here
Failover promotes the secondary database to primary; it is never deleted and re-created. It is tempting because geo-replication setup involves creating the secondary, and re-creation would apply if the secondary were removed and re-provisioned rather than promoted during failover.
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JA
Written and reviewed by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Microsoft exam blueprint
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.