DP-900 Practice Question: Describe considerations for working with non-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 Table Storage

  Why it's wrong here

  Azure Table Storage is a NoSQL key-value store organized around entities with a PartitionKey and RowKey; each entity contains a set of typed scalar properties such as strings, integers, and booleans. It cannot persist native JSON documents—you would have to serialize the entire JSON object into a single string property, which makes querying individual fields impractical and impossible with the Table REST API. Because the storage layer has no concept of nested JSON or server-side filtering beyond partition/row keys, it is not a document database and fails this workload.

• ✗

  Azure SQL Database

  Why it's wrong here

  Azure SQL Database is a relational database engine that enforces a fixed schema at the table level, so every column must be declared before data is inserted. While you can store JSON text in an NVARCHAR column and parse it with OPENJSON, the database does not treat JSON as a native document; it is just a string that has to be reconciled with the underlying relational model. Any schema evolution for JSON documents would require ALTER TABLE statements, migrations, and likely breaks the flexibility needed for a document workload.

• ✗

  Azure Blob Storage

  Why it's wrong here

  Azure Blob Storage is an object store designed for unstructured binary or text data like images, videos, logs, and backup files. You can certainly upload a .json file as a blob, but Blob Storage does not index, validate, or query the JSON content; discovering or filtering data requires you to download the entire file and parse it client-side, or bolt on a separate service such as Azure Cognitive Search. Given its lack of native JSON query capabilities and schema lifecycle management, it is unsuitable for storing JSON documents that need to be queried and evolved.

• ✓

  Azure Cosmos DB

  Why this is correct

  Azure Cosmos DB is the correct choice because it is a natively schema-agnostic, multi-model NoSQL database. It stores JSON documents as first-class items in an indexable, physically contiguous format, and its SQL-like query engine can directly reference nested JSON properties without any pre-defined table structure. Documents with completely different fields can sit side-by-side in the same container, and the service also provides global distribution, multiple consistency levels, and tunable indexing to meet operational requirements.

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