Question

Difficulty: MediumDesign Relational Database HA and DR

An enterprise is designing a disaster recovery and high availability solution for an inventory management application. The database tier has the following requirements:
- Support for SQL Server Agent jobs and cross-database queries.
- Automatic failover to a secondary Azure region with a single connection string that automatically routes write traffic to the active primary.
- Provision of a secondary read-only endpoint in the secondary region for reporting workloads.

Which two database configurations should you include in the design to meet the requirements? (Select two.)

  1. Deploy Azure SQL Managed Instance in both the primary and secondary regions, configured within an auto-failover group.Answer
  2. Configure the application to connect using the auto-failover group's read-write listener endpoint.Answer
  3. C
    Deploy Azure SQL Database single databases using active geo-replication to the secondary region.
  4. D
    Configure a SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines deployment using Standard HDD storage for transaction log disks.

Answer

To meet the requirements, the design must include deploying Azure SQL Managed Instance in both the primary and secondary regions within an auto-failover group, and configuring the application to connect using the auto-failover group's read-write listener endpoint.
Deploying Azure SQL Managed Instance in an auto-failover group satisfies the requirements for SQL Server Agent and cross-database queries while providing automatic failover. Utilizing the auto-failover group's read-write listener endpoint ensures that the application connection string automatically routes write traffic to the active primary region without manual configuration updates during a failover event.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify the database requirements for instance-level features.
SQL Server Agent and cross-database queries necessitate Azure SQL Managed Instance or SQL Server on Azure VMs, ruling out Azure SQL Database single databases.
Azure SQL Database single databases do not support these features natively.
2
Evaluate high availability and disaster recovery requirements.
Automatic failover with a single connection string is met by Azure SQL auto-failover groups, which provide a read-write listener endpoint.
Auto-failover groups automate failover and manage routing, unlike active geo-replication which requires manual failover orchestration.
3
Verify storage and performance constraints.
Standard HDD storage is insufficient for database transaction logs due to latency and throughput limits, making Premium SSD or Ultra Disk required.
SQL Server database transaction logs require low-latency write operations to avoid performance bottlenecks.

Key Concept

Relational database HA and DR design using Azure SQL Managed Instance auto-failover groups
Rate this question