DP-900 Practice Question: Identify considerations for relational data on Azure
A multinational corporation runs a mission-critical relational database on Azure SQL Database. They require automatic failover to a secondary region in case of a regional outage, with no data loss. The secondary region must also be readable for reporting purposes. What should they implement?
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
✓
Failover group with a readable secondary in a different region
A failover group with a readable secondary in a different region provides automatic failover (no manual intervention) and the secondary can be used for read-only queries. This meets the requirement of automatic failover, no data loss (synchronous replication when using Premium or Business Critical tiers), and read access for reporting. Option A (Active Geo-Replication) requires manual failover, not automatic. Option B (Read Scale-Out) creates a local readable secondary, not in a different region, and does not provide failover. Option C (Azure Site Recovery) is designed for VM and physical server replication, not for Azure SQL Database.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Active Geo-Replication with manual failover
Why it's wrong here
Active Geo-Replication creates a readable secondary in a different region and can support a manual failover plan, but it does not trigger failover automatically when connectivity or health degrades. The application must be pointed to the new primary manually or through its own custom orchestration, leaving the mission-critical RTO exposed to human latency and error. In a failover-group design, by contrast, automatic health policies handle that transition, which is exactly the requirement here.
- ✗
Read Scale-Out with a local secondary replica
Why it's wrong here
Read Scale-Out is an Azure SQL Database high-availability feature that creates one read-only replica within the same logical server or availability zone, strictly for offloading reporting and analytical queries. Because the secondary is not geo-redundant and its failover behavior is controlled at the local availability level, it cannot serve as a disaster recovery mechanism for a multinational corporation requiring cross-region resilience. It also lacks a remote automatic-failover listener, so it would not satisfy the stated failover requirement.
- ✗
Azure Site Recovery for the database server
Why it's wrong here
Azure Site Recovery is an IaaS-centric orchestration service that replicates entire virtual machines, their disks and workloads, but it has no agentless integration for Azure SQL Database's managed storage layer. Since Azure SQL Database is a Platform-as-a-Service offering run on Microsoft-managed infrastructure, there is no VM or hypervisor boundary for Site Recovery to fail over; protecting the database service must be done with database-native geo-replication features. Therefore, Site Recovery cannot provide the automatic, transaction-consistent failover needed for this database.
- ✓
Failover group with a readable secondary in a different region
Why this is correct
A failover group on Azure SQL Database wraps the underlying geo-replication into an automatic, policy-driven failover mechanism, with a read-write listener and a separate read-only listener for reporting workloads. The readable secondary in a different region gives the corporation both a hot standby and a queryable copy for analytics, while automatic failover handles a regional outage without manual intervention. Failover groups are the intended PaaS database-native pattern for exactly this mission-critical, multi-region scenario.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Data Roles and Core Concepts
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.
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.
About these practice questions
One of 820 original DP-900 practice questions on Courseiva, each with a full explanation and wrong-answer analysis — not exam dumps or protected exam content. Learn why practice questions differ from exam dumps →
JA
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.