DP-900 Practice Question: Identify considerations for relational data on Azure
A company needs to store order data for an e-commerce platform. The system requires high concurrency, fast inserts, and the ability to enforce referential integrity between tables (e.g., Customers and Orders). Which Azure service should they use?
⚠ Common exam trap
A common mix-up: candidates confuse high concurrency and fast inserts with NoSQL solutions like Cosmos DB, overlooking the explicit requirement for referential integrity which only a relational database like Azure SQL Database can enforce.
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
✓
Azure SQL Database
Azure SQL Database is a fully managed relational database service that supports high concurrency, fast inserts, and enforces referential integrity through foreign key constraints. It provides ACID transactions and row-level locking to handle concurrent writes efficiently, making it ideal for e-commerce order processing where data consistency between Customers and Orders tables is critical.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✓
Azure SQL Database
Why this is correct
Azure SQL Database is a fully managed relational database service that enforces a fixed schema and guarantees ACID transactions. For e-commerce order data, this means foreign keys can maintain referential integrity between orders, customers, and line items, while row-level locking supports high concurrency without lost updates. Its built-in indexing and transaction logging make it the appropriate choice for transactional workloads where consistency is non-negotiable.
- ✗
Azure Cosmos DB
Why it's wrong here
Azure Cosmos DB is a multi-model NoSQL database with flexible schemas and tunable consistency, but it does not enforce relational constraints such as foreign keys or primary keys across documents. While it can be used for order data, maintaining referential integrity and performing real-time joins must be handled manually in application code. Its strengths are horizontal scaling and global distribution, not strict transactional integrity, which is why it is incorrect for a system that requires relational guarantees.
- ✗
Azure Blob Storage
Why it's wrong here
Azure Blob Storage is an object storage service intended for unstructured or binary data such as images, product photos, videos, and backup archives. It has no schema engine, no query language for relational operations, and no support for ACID transactions or enforced constraints. Storing order data there would require building an entire data-access layer from scratch and would still lack the atomicity and isolation needed for reliable order processing.
- ✗
Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2
Why it's wrong here
Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 is built on Blob Storage with a hierarchical namespace and is designed for large-scale analytical workloads. It uses schema-on-read, meaning data is stored without predefined structure, and it does not provide transactional guarantees like atomic multistatement commits. While it can store order history for later analytics, it is not a transactional database and cannot enforce relationships or constraints, making it unsuitable for processing live e-commerce orders.
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
Row
A row is a horizontal record in a database table that contains all the information about a single entity, like one customer or one product.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
Senior Network & Security Engineer · founder of Courseiva
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