Question

Difficulty: MediumDesign Relational Database HA and DR

A retail organization hosts its main loyalty transaction database on a single database in Azure SQL Database (Business Critical tier) in the East US region. You are designing a disaster recovery (DR) solution that replicates the database to the West US region. The solution must meet the following requirements:
* Database failover to the secondary region must be initiated manually by the operations team.
* Reporting applications must be able to query the secondary replica using a single, constant connection endpoint that does not require reconfiguration or connection string updates after a failover.

Which configuration should you recommend to meet these requirements?

  1. Configure a Failover Group containing the database, set the read-write failover policy to manual, and configure the reporting applications to use the read-only listener endpoint.Answer
  2. B
    Configure Active Geo-replication to the West US region, and configure the reporting applications to connect directly to the secondary server name.
  3. C
    Configure a Failover Group containing the database, set the read-write failover policy to automatic, and configure the reporting applications to use the read-only listener endpoint.
  4. D
    Migrate the database to an Azure SQL Managed Instance, configure active geo-replication, and configure the reporting applications to connect directly to the secondary instance endpoint.

Answer

Configure a Failover Group containing the database, set the read-write failover policy to manual, and configure the reporting applications to use the read-only listener endpoint.
A Failover Group provides a stable read-only listener endpoint that automatically routes read traffic to the secondary database replica. By setting the failover policy to manual, the operations team retains control over initiating database failover while allowing the application connection strings to remain unchanged.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the high availability and disaster recovery requirements.
Identified that the secondary replica must reside in West US, failover must be manual, and reporting applications require a single connection endpoint that remains constant during failover.
Understanding the constraints is necessary to select the correct replication technology and configuration options.
2
Compare replication options for Azure SQL Database.
Failover Groups provide a read-only listener endpoint that remains constant across failovers, whereas Active Geo-replication requires updating the connection strings to the specific server names after failover.
This determines that a Failover Group is required to satisfy the endpoint stability requirement.
3
Configure the failover policy of the Failover Group.
Setting the read-write failover policy to manual meets the requirement of allowing the operations team to manually initiate the failover.
An automatic failover policy would violate the operational control requirement.

Key Concept

Azure SQL Database Failover Groups allow grouping databases for replication and failover, offering read-write and read-only listener endpoints that survive failover events, with support for both automatic and manual failover policies.
Estimated Time:1m 30s
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