Question 85 of 820
DP-900 Practice Question: Identify considerations for relational data on Azure
A financial services company runs a critical application on Azure SQL Managed Instance. They need to ensure that a recent transaction can be recovered within 15 minutes of a user error. Which feature should they configure?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse disaster recovery features (Geo-restore, failover groups) with data recovery features (PITR), assuming any backup-related option can recover from a user error, but only PITR provides the granular, time-specific restore needed for transactional errors.
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
✓
Point-in-time restore (PITR)
Point-in-time restore (PITR) is the correct feature because it allows you to restore an Azure SQL Managed Instance to a specific point in time within the retention period (default 7 days, configurable up to 35 days). This directly addresses the requirement to recover a recent transaction after a user error, such as an accidental data modification or deletion, within 15 minutes. PITR creates a new database from automated backups, enabling precise recovery to the moment just before the error occurred.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Geo-restore
Why it's wrong here
Geo-restore is designed for regional disaster recovery, not for undoing user errors. It restores the entire database from geo-redundant backups (RA-GRS) to a new server in a different region, with a recovery point determined by the last geo-replicated backup — typically up to 1 hour behind the primary due to asynchronous replication. It cannot restore to a specific logical point in time, so it fails as a quick fix for accidental data deletion or software bugs.
- ✓
Point-in-time restore (PITR)
Why this is correct
Point-in-time restore (PITR) is the correct solution because it recreates a database to any specific second within the automated backup retention period (default 7 days, up to 35 days for vCore) by replaying transaction logs over a full backup. This lets you roll back an accidental table drop, erroneous UPDATE, or malformed migration without affecting the current production database — the restore creates a new database at the chosen timestamp. It directly addresses the logical error scenario described.
- ✗
Automatic failover groups
Why it's wrong here
Automatic failover groups provide high availability and disaster recovery by maintaining a continuously replicated read-only secondary database and automatically promoting it during an outage. However, failover does not roll back data — the secondary contains the same corrupted or erroneous transactions as the primary, because replication is asynchronous and copies everything. It is an availability feature, not a mechanism for reverting to a historical point in time, so it cannot help with user- or application-induced logical errors.
- ✗
Long-term retention (LTR)
Why it's wrong here
Long-term retention (LTR) retains full and differential backups for up to 10 years for compliance or archival purposes, but its restore granularity is limited to the backup snapshot times (e.g., weekly full backups), not arbitrary points within the last few hours. Recovering a recent user error via LTR would require restoring a potentially days-old backup, losing all transactions after that snapshot, and does not offer the precise second-level rewind that PITR provides. It is intended for old data retention, not operational recovery.
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Last reviewed: Jun 24, 2026
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