DP-900 Practice Question: Identify considerations for relational data on Azure
Your company uses Azure SQL Database to power a global application. You need to ensure that users in Europe and Asia have low-latency read access to product data, while writes are synchronized across all regions. What should you configure?
⚠ Common exam trap
Watch out — candidates often confuse failover groups (which provide a single readable secondary for disaster recovery) with Active Geo-Replication (which supports multiple readable secondaries for distributed read scaling), or mistakenly think Traffic Manager alone can solve the read latency issue without database-level replication.
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
✓
Configure Active Geo-Replication with readable secondaries in Europe and Asia.
Active Geo-Replication for Azure SQL Database allows you to configure readable secondary replicas in different Azure regions. This provides low-latency read access for users in Europe and Asia by directing their read traffic to the nearest secondary, while writes are synchronized asynchronously to all secondaries, ensuring data consistency across regions.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
- ✗
Use Azure Traffic Manager to route users to the nearest Azure SQL Database instance.
Why it's wrong here
Azure Traffic Manager performs DNS-level traffic routing based on performance or geographic policies, but it has no knowledge of database contents and does not replicate data. If you route users to different Azure SQL Database instances, each instance will have a separate copy of data that diverges over time unless you explicitly replicate it. Thus, it only addresses network distance, not data availability, and cannot provide consistent low-latency reads of the same relational dataset.
- ✗
Migrate to Azure Cosmos DB for multi-region writes.
Why it's wrong here
Cosmos DB is a globally distributed NoSQL service that genuinely supports multi-region writes, but it is not a relational database. Migrating from Azure SQL Database would require redesigning schemas, DDL, SQL queries, and transactional patterns, and it would lose features like T-SQL, related views, and ACID multi-row transactions. While it solves write scale and global distribution, this option is a fundamentally different data model and is excessive if you simply need to improve read latency for an existing relational application.
- ✗
Create a failover group that includes all regions.
Why it's wrong here
Failover groups enable automatic, replication-based failover of a primary Azure SQL Database to a secondary region for business continuity, but they do not proactively distribute read traffic across regions in normal operation. A failover group exposes a single read-write listener and a read-only listener for the secondary, but the secondary is not intended to serve independent read workloads while the primary is healthy. Therefore, it addresses disaster recovery and failover, not the goal of reducing read latency for users distributed across Europe and Asia.
- ✓
Configure Active Geo-Replication with readable secondaries in Europe and Asia.
Why this is correct
Active Geo-Replication lets you create up to four readable secondary replicas of an Azure SQL Database in different regions, each asynchronously updated from the primary. By placing secondaries in Europe and Asia, you can route read-only connections to the nearest replica using a connection string with ApplicationIntent=ReadOnly, dramatically lowering read latency for local users. This preserves the relational engine, supports primary-region writes, and also yields incidental disaster recovery if the primary becomes unavailable, making it the precise fit for the global read scenario.
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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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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.