DP-900 Practice Question: Identify considerations for relational data on Azure
A company is designing a multi-tenant SaaS application. Each tenant has its own relational database, but the total number of tenants is expected to grow rapidly. The company wants to manage all databases efficiently and optimize costs by sharing resources among tenants with low usage. What should they 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
✓
Azure SQL Database elastic pools
Elastic pools in Azure SQL Database allow sharing resources among multiple databases, optimizing cost for low-usage tenants in a multi-tenant SaaS application. Option A (SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines) requires manual resource management and does not offer elastic pools. Option B (Azure SQL Managed Instance) is designed for single large databases, not for sharing resources across many databases. Option C (Azure Database for MySQL) does not have elastic pools; elastic pools are a feature of 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.
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SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines
Why it's wrong here
Running SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines is an IaaS deployment that forces you to patch, back up, license, and manually configure high availability for the VM and SQL Server. For a multi-tenant SaaS app, you would end up overprovisioning a single large VM or spinning up many VMs to avoid noisy neighbors, and there is no built-in mechanism to dynamically reallocate unused capacity across tenant databases. Elastic pools provide exactly that auto-scaling shared resource model, so this approach is less cost-efficient and operationally heavier.
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Azure SQL Managed Instance
Why it's wrong here
Azure SQL Managed Instance gives you near-100% SQL Server compatibility with dedicated vCores and storage per instance, but it is not a multi-tenant elastic pool offering. While you could host several tenant databases on one managed instance, the instance's resources are statically allocated, and you cannot set per-database minimum and maximum resource values like you can with elastic pools. For a SaaS workload where tenant usage fluctuates independently, this means you either overpay for peak capacity or risk performance interference.
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Azure Database for MySQL with elastic pools
Why it's wrong here
Azure Database for MySQL does not offer an elastic pools feature; elastic pools are specific to Azure SQL Database in the SQL Server-based Azure data services. To pool resources for MySQL you would have to build manual sharding or use separate single-server instances, neither of which provides the automatic shared capacity management required by a multi-tenant SaaS application. Therefore, this option combines a real service with a capability that does not exist for it.
- ✓
Azure SQL Database elastic pools
Why this is correct
Azure SQL Database elastic pools are designed specifically for multi-tenant SaaS: you purchase a shared pool of eDTUs or vCores and place each tenant in its own database inside that pool. Each database is assigned a minimum and maximum resource limit, allowing idle tenants to contribute unused capacity to busy tenants while still guaranteeing a base level of performance. This automatically balances cost and performance across thousands of small, intermittently active tenant workloads, making it the ideal choice for this scenario.
Go deeper
Related to this question
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Relational Data Concepts
Key term
SQL Managed Instance
SQL Managed Instance is a cloud database service from Azure that gives you most of the features of a full SQL Server instance without you having to manage the underlying hardware or software patches.
Key term
Relational database
A relational database organizes data into tables with rows and columns, where each table relates to others using unique keys, allowing efficient storage, retrieval, and manipulation of structured information.
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Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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