DP-900 Practice Question: Identify considerations for relational data on Azure
A company runs a mission-critical SQL Server database on-premises. They plan to migrate to Azure SQL Database and need to choose the appropriate service tier. The database is currently 500 GB and is expected to grow to 8 TB within two years. The workload is read-heavy with many concurrent users, and they require fast scaling of compute resources without significant downtime. Which Azure SQL Database service tier should they choose?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse the 4 TB limit of General Purpose and Business Critical with the 100 TB limit of Hyperscale, or assume that Serverless is suitable for any workload that needs scaling, ignoring its auto-pausing behavior and lack of support for high concurrency and consistent performance.
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
✓
Hyperscale
Hyperscale is the correct choice because it supports databases up to 100 TB, far exceeding the expected 8 TB growth, and provides fast scaling of compute resources without downtime by using a distributed architecture with separate compute and storage nodes. Its read-heavy workload with many concurrent users benefits from Hyperscale's multiple readable replicas and buffer pool extension, ensuring high performance and availability.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
General Purpose
Why it's wrong here
General Purpose is a balanced tier that uses remote storage, which keeps costs lower but introduces higher I/O latency and a hard 4 TB size limit. Because the database is expected to grow to 8 TB, the storage ceiling alone disqualifies this tier. Additionally, General Purpose does not provide the same rapid, online compute scaling or the high-availability architecture demanded by a mission-critical workload, so it is not the right fit.
- ✗
Business Critical
Why it's wrong here
Business Critical offers local SSD storage and multiple synchronous replicas, giving excellent performance and high availability for mission-critical systems. However, it is still capped at 4 TB of database storage, which makes it impossible to accommodate the projected 8 TB growth. While compute can be scaled, the operation is not as instantaneous as Hyperscale's online node rotation, and the tier's architecture is not designed for the storage scale and read-heavy concurrency patterns where Hyperscale excels.
- ✓
Hyperscale
Why this is correct
Hyperscale tier supports databases up to 100 TB, allows fast scaling of compute resources with minimal downtime, and is optimized for read-heavy workloads with high concurrency. It is the best fit for databases that exceed 4 TB and require rapid scaling.
- ✗
Serverless
Why it's wrong here
Serverless is a compute model for the General Purpose tier that auto-scales compute based on workload, but it is still limited to 4 TB storage and does not address the need for large database size and fast scaling.
Go deeper
Related to this question
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Azure SQL Services
Key term
Azure SQL Database
Azure SQL Database is a fully managed relational database-as-a-service (DBaaS) in Microsoft Azure, based on the SQL Server engine, that handles scaling, backups, patching, and high availability automatically.
Key term
Service
A service is a software component or system that performs a specific function and is available to be used by other programs or users over a network.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
This DP-900 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-900 exam.