DP-900 Practice Question: Identify considerations for relational data on Azure
A company is designing a new application that will store customer orders in a relational database on Azure. The data includes order IDs, customer IDs, product IDs, quantities, and order dates. The application needs to support complex queries that join multiple tables and enforce referential integrity. Which Azure service should the company use?
⚠ Common exam trap
DP-900 often tests the confusion between relational (Azure SQL Database) and NoSQL (Cosmos DB, Table Storage) services, tempting candidates to pick Cosmos DB for its scalability even when the requirement explicitly demands joins and referential integrity.
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
Azure SQL Database is a fully managed relational database engine (SQL Server-based) that supports T-SQL, complex multi-table joins, foreign keys, and referential integrity constraints. The described workload — orders with IDs, quantities, dates, and joins across customers/products — is a classic OLTP relational pattern, which Azure SQL Database is purpose-built for.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Azure SQL Database
Why this is correct
Azure SQL Database is a fully managed relational database engine that provides complete T-SQL support, including table joins with various join types, primary/foreign key enforcement, check constraints, and ACID transactions. This makes it the only option in the list that natively supports the referential integrity and complex relational queries expected when designing an application that stores customer data across normalized tables. It also offers built-in high availability, automated backups, and scaling options, so it aligns with both the relational data model and operational requirements.
- ✗
Azure Table Storage
Why it's wrong here
Azure Table Storage is a NoSQL key-value and wide-column store that organizes data into entities accessed by a partition key and a row key. It does not support server-side joins, foreign keys, or any relational integrity constraints, so modeling customers with related child records would require manual client-side lookups, repeated queries, and denormalized entity designs. While it is highly scalable for simple lookups, it is not a relational database and cannot serve the need for complex relational queries described in the scenario.
- ✗
Azure Cosmos DB
Why it's wrong here
Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model NoSQL database service that supports document, graph, key-value, and column-family APIs. Although it can perform limited intra-document self-joins and client-side composable queries, it does not enforce foreign keys or cross-partition referential integrity, and complex relational joins are typically avoided in favor of denormalized data models. Its design priorities are horizontal scale, low latency, and flexible schemas—features that trade away the relational guarantees this application requires.
- ✗
Azure Blob Storage
Why it's wrong here
Azure Blob Storage is an object storage service designed for unstructured data, such as images, videos, backups, or text files, stored in flat containers with metadata and a URL-based address. It has no query engine capable of performing relational joins, enforcing constraints, or executing predicate-based SQL across objects; retrieving related customer data would require downloading and processing objects in application code. Therefore, it is completely inappropriate for hosting a relational schema for a customer-centric application.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Temporal Tables in Azure SQL
Key term
OLTP
OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) is a data processing system designed to manage and record high volumes of real-time transactions, such as bank deposits or online purchases, quickly and reliably.
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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Last reviewed September 2026 · checked against the official Microsoft exam blueprint
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