DP-900 Practice Question: Identify considerations for relational data on Azure

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 Managed Instance

  Why this is correct

  Azure SQL Managed Instance is a full PaaS deployment of the SQL Server database engine that offers nearly 100% surface-area compatibility with on-premises SQL Server. It supports SQL Server Agent, linked servers, cross-database queries, and CLR, while relieving you of patching and backup management. It runs inside your Azure virtual network to support private IP addresses, making it the preferred target for lift-and-shift migrations without redesigning applications.

• ✓

  Azure SQL Database

  Why this is correct

  Azure SQL Database is a fully managed relational database-as-a-service that provides a single database or an elastic pool to share resources among multiple databases. It includes built-in high availability, automated backups, failover groups, and intelligent performance tuning, but deliberately excludes some SQL Server features like SQL Server Agent and cross-database queries. It is optimized for cloud-native applications and modern app development.

• ✗

  Azure Cosmos DB

  Why it's wrong here

  Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed, multi-model NoSQL database service that supports document, key-value, graph, and wide-column data models via APIs like Core SQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Gremlin, and Table. Its SQL API uses a JSON-based query language, not the T-SQL relational engine, and it does not implement SQL Server semantics such as stored procedures, joins, or transactional consistency in the same way. Therefore it cannot be a deployment option for Azure SQL; it is a separate service on the same Azure platform.

• ✗

  Azure Database for MariaDB

  Why it's wrong here

  Azure Database for MariaDB is a managed community database service based on the MariaDB source code, a fork of MySQL, and it belongs to the open-source family of Azure services alongside MySQL and PostgreSQL. It supports the MySQL wire protocol and features, not Microsoft SQL Server's T-SQL dialect, SQL Server Agent, or Integration Services. Consequently, it is not an Azure SQL deployment option and cannot run SQL Server workloads without significant migration changes.

• ✗

  Azure Synapse Analytics Dedicated SQL Pool

  Why it's wrong here

  Azure Synapse Analytics Dedicated SQL Pool, formerly SQL Data Warehouse, is a cloud data warehouse service built on a massively parallel processing (MPP) architecture that distributes data across 60 distributions. It uses T-SQL but is designed exclusively for large-scale analytical queries, not for transactional OLTP workloads, and it is managed under the Azure Synapse service, which blends SQL with Spark and Pipelines. Since it has its own deployment model, billing, and resource management, it is not one of the deployment options for Azure SQL.

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