DP-900 Practice Question: Identify considerations for relational data on Azure
A company uses Azure SQL Database with geo-replication for disaster recovery. During a regional outage, they manually failover to the secondary region. After the primary region is restored, they need to re-establish geo-replication with minimal downtime. What should they do?
⚠ Common exam trap
Candidates often confuse the initial failover (which may be forced) with the recovery process, assuming they must recreate the geo-replication link or drop the database, when in fact a planned failover cleanly reverses the roles with minimal downtime.
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
✓
Initiate a planned failover to switch back to the original region
After a manual failover to the secondary region, the original primary becomes a secondary database. To re-establish geo-replication with minimal downtime, you should initiate a planned failover (also called a graceful failover) to switch back to the original region. This operation reverses the roles without data loss and avoids the need to reseed the database, keeping downtime to seconds.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Initiate a planned failover to switch back to the original region
Why this is correct
A planned failover is the only supported way to reverse geo-replication roles without data loss. It synchronizes the secondary to the primary's latest committed transaction, then promotes the secondary to primary, and automatically re-establishes the replication link in the opposite direction. This is the correct failback procedure when the original region is healthy, because it preserves transactional consistency and avoids re-seeding.
- ✗
Drop the secondary database and create a new one
Why it's wrong here
Dropping the secondary database permanently removes the failover target and all replicated data in that region. Creating a new secondary would force Azure SQL Database to re-seed an initial snapshot from the primary, which requires downtime and does not accomplish a role swap. This approach also exposes you to a full data loss window if a failover is needed during the re-seeding process, so it is never the right way to switch back.
- ✗
Delete the geo-replication link and create a new one
Why it's wrong here
Deleting the geo-replication link terminates the continuous copy between the two databases and leaves them as independent single databases. Re-creating the link would require a full initial synchronization, during which the new secondary is not in a synchronizing state and cannot be failed over. This does not perform a controlled switchback; it just tears down and rebuilds replication, creating an unnecessary risk window and potential data divergence from the primary.
- ✗
Manually swap the roles of the primary and secondary
Why it's wrong here
There is no manual 'swap' operation in Azure SQL Database geo-replication; the only way to exchange primary and secondary roles is through an explicit failover command (planned or forced). Attempting to manually swap roles by editing connection strings, renaming databases, or changing metadata would not synchronize transaction log data and would likely cause connection failures or split-brain scenarios. The database engine controls the role state, so any non-failover, ad-hoc swap is unsupported and unsafe.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Data Roles and Core Concepts
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
Data
Data is raw, unprocessed information, like numbers, words, or measurements, that can be stored, processed, and analyzed by computers.
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