DP-900 Practice Question: Describe considerations for working with non-relational data on Azure
A company stores sensor data in Azure Blob Storage. The data is appended every minute and rarely modified. The compliance team requires that blobs older than 90 days be moved to a more cost-effective storage tier, and blobs older than 365 days be deleted. Which solution should you recommend?
⚠ Common exam trap
DP-900 often tests the confusion between backup retention and lifecycle management; candidates pick Azure Backup thinking it deletes or tiers live data, when it only manages recovery points.
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 a Blob Storage lifecycle management policy.
Azure Blob Storage lifecycle management policies let you define rules that transition blobs to cooler tiers (Cool, Cold, Archive) after a specified number of days and delete them after another threshold. This directly satisfies the 90-day tier move and 365-day deletion requirements without custom code.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use Azure Backup to set a retention policy for the storage account.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Backup is a dedicated service for protecting Azure VMs, SQL/SAP HANA databases, and Azure file shares by creating application-consistent recovery points and applying retention at the vault level. It does not provide a storage-account-wide retention policy that automatically tiers or deletes blobs; blob lifecycle actions are handled natively by Blob Storage lifecycle management, so using Azure Backup here is architecturally out of scope.
- ✓
Configure a Blob Storage lifecycle management policy.
Why this is correct
A Blob Storage lifecycle management policy is the correct tool because it lets you define rule-based actions that automatically transition blobs to cooler tiers (hot to cool, cool to archive) and expire them after a specified number of days since last modification. For sensor data that becomes less frequently accessed over time, this is the native, cost-optimized mechanism to enforce retention and deletion without manual intervention or additional services.
- ✗
Enable Blob Soft Delete and set retention days to 365.
Why it's wrong here
Blob Soft Delete is a data-protection feature that preserves accidentally deleted blobs for a configurable period, enabling recovery after a deletion event. It does not act on live blobs—it only takes effect once a blob is explicitly deleted—so it cannot automatically tier or schedule removal of active sensor data. Setting retention to 365 days would only keep deleted blobs recoverable, not manage their lifecycle while they are still in the container.
- ✗
Move the blobs to Azure Files and set a file retention policy.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Files is a managed file-share service built for SMB/NFS workloads, not for high-scale object-based sensor telemetry, and it offers no native blob lifecycle tiering or expiration policies. It also lacks a built-in file retention policy that deletes or archives files based on age; any such behavior would need to be custom-built. Moving blobs to Azure Files would increase both cost and operational complexity while failing to solve the underlying tiering requirement.
Quick reference
Azure Blob Storage Tier Comparison
| Tier | Storage Cost | Retrieval Cost | Latency | Use Case |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hot | Highest | Lowest | Immediate | Active data, frequent reads |
| Cool | Lower | Higher | Immediate | Data accessed < once / month |
| Cold | Lower still | Higher | Immediate | Data accessed < once / quarter |
| Archive | Lowest | Highest + rehydration delay | Hours | Long-term compliance retention |
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Azure SQL Elastic Pool Cost Optimisation
Key term
Data
Data is raw, unprocessed information, like numbers, words, or measurements, that can be stored, processed, and analyzed by computers.
Key term
Blob storage
Blob storage is a cloud service for storing large amounts of unstructured data, such as text or binary data, like documents, images, and videos.
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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-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.