DP-900 Practice Question: Identify considerations for relational data on Azure
A multinational e-commerce company uses Azure SQL Database for its order processing system. They need to ensure that if an entire Azure region becomes unavailable, the database remains available with minimal data loss and automatic failover. Which feature should they implement?
⚠ Common exam trap
It's easy for candidates to confuse 'automatic tuning' (a performance feature) with 'automatic failover' (a disaster recovery feature), or assume that serverless compute or elastic pools inherently provide high availability, which they do not.
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
✓
Active geo-replication
Active geo-replication (Option A) is correct because it creates readable secondary replicas of an Azure SQL Database in a paired Azure region, enabling automatic failover during a regional outage. This feature provides a recovery point objective (RPO) of as low as 5 seconds and a recovery time objective (RTO) of under 1 hour, ensuring minimal data loss and high 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.
- ✓
Active geo-replication
Why this is correct
Active geo-replication continuously replicates committed transactions from the primary Azure SQL database to a secondary database in a different Azure region using asynchronous Always On technology. It is the intended disaster-recovery feature because it maintains a readable warm standby that can be promoted during an outage, and when paired with an auto-failover group it can switch customer traffic automatically. This directly addresses the requirement for cross-region availability in a multinational e-commerce deployment.
- ✗
Automatic tuning
Why it's wrong here
Automatic tuning is an AI-driven performance feature that applies index recommendations, plan-force changes, and automatic plan/index regression corrections inside a single Azure SQL database. It neither copies database files nor replicates transaction log records to another region, so it cannot protect the database if the primary region becomes unavailable. Its scope is query performance optimization, not resiliency or geo-redundancy.
- ✗
Elastic pools
Why it's wrong here
Elastic pools provide a shared set of compute and storage resources across a collection of databases on one logical server, allowing bursty workloads to share eDTUs or vCores and reducing cost. However, all databases in an elastic pool reside in the same geographic region and are tied to the same logical server, so the pool provides no secondary copy in another region. It manages resource allocation, not data locality or disaster recovery.
- ✗
Serverless compute
Why it's wrong here
Serverless compute is a pricing and scaling mode for Azure SQL Database that automatically pauses idle databases and scales compute up or down based on active workload demand. It only affects the compute layer; storage, backups, and transaction data remain on the same regional infrastructure, and there is no cross-region replication of data. Consequently, an entire regional failure would still take the database offline, making it unsuitable as a disaster-recovery mechanism.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Data Roles and Core Concepts
Key term
Data
Data is raw, unprocessed information, like numbers, words, or measurements, that can be stored, processed, and analyzed by computers.
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.
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