DP-900 Practice Question: Describe considerations for working with non-relational data on Azure
Which THREE of the following are valid considerations when choosing between Azure Cosmos DB and Azure Table Storage?
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
✓
Cosmos DB provides multiple consistency levels
Option B is correct because Azure Cosmos DB exposes five well-defined consistency levels (strong, bounded staleness, session, consistent prefix, and eventual), letting you trade off latency and consistency per workload, whereas Azure Table Storage offers only strong consistency within a region. Option C is correct because Cosmos DB supports multi-region writes (multi-master) across its configured regions, allowing writes to any region and automatic conflict resolution, which is a key differentiator from Table Storage. Option E is correct because Cosmos DB automatically indexes every property in a document by default (with an indexing policy you can tune), so no manual index management is needed, unlike Table Storage where you must design and maintain partition/row key indexes yourself. Option A is not correct because Azure Table Storage is single-region for writes; it supports read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) for read-only replicas, not multi-region writes. Option D is not correct because Cosmos DB's SQL (Core) API stores data as JSON documents, and it also offers APIs for other models, so it fully supports JSON.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Table Storage supports multi-region writes
Why it's wrong here
Table Storage is a single-region write service; even with read-access geo-redundant storage, the secondary endpoint is read-only and cannot accept write operations. Therefore, claiming Table Storage supports multi-region writes is incorrect, as write traffic must always target the primary region. This limitation forces applications that need global write scalability to look at services like Cosmos DB.
- ✓
Cosmos DB provides multiple consistency levels
Why this is correct
Cosmos DB offers five well-defined consistency levels, from strong to eventual, letting architects tune the latency-versus-consistency trade-off per workload. Table Storage provides only strong consistency within a partition, so this difference is a genuine selection consideration between the two services.
- ✓
Cosmos DB supports multi-region writes
Why this is correct
With Cosmos DB, write operations can be accepted in any of the regions configured for multi-region write, enabling active-active replication across many geographic regions. This contrasts with Table Storage, where only one region is writable and secondary regions serve as read-only replicas. Multi-region writes reduce write latency for distributed users and provide continuous availability even if an entire write region fails.
- ✗
Cosmos DB does not support JSON documents
Why it's wrong here
Cosmos DB is a multi-model NoSQL database in which JSON is the native wire format for documents, and the core SQL API stores and queries JSON directly. It also supports BSON for MongoDB compatibility, but JSON is always available without translation or transformation. Hence, stating that Cosmos DB does not support JSON is factually incorrect and overlooks its fundamental document model.
- ✓
Cosmos DB automatically indexes all properties
Why this is correct
Cosmos DB's default automatic indexing of all properties is a fundamental technical mechanism that provides immediate query performance across all data attributes. This eliminates the need for manual index management, a significant advantage over Azure Table Storage, which only indexes Partition Key and Row Key. Therefore, the requirement for flexible, performant querying on non-key properties makes automatic indexing a crucial consideration when choosing between these services.
Go deeper
Related to this question
Learn chapter
Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 Hierarchical Namespace
Key term
Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB is a fully managed, globally distributed NoSQL database service that offers fast reads and writes anywhere in the world with automatic scaling and multiple consistency models.
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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