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Difficulty: MediumRelational Data Storage Solutions

A company plans a new deployment of a customer portal application that requires 30 separate relational databases, one for each regional office. The databases have highly variable and unpredictable usage patterns throughout the day, with peaks occurring at different times. The solution must ensure high availability, minimize administrative overhead, and optimize hosting costs by sharing database resources. No database requires instance-level features such as SQL Server Agent or CLR. Which Azure SQL deployment option should you recommend?

  1. Azure SQL Database elastic poolsAnswer
  2. B
    Azure SQL Database single databases
  3. C
    Azure SQL Database Managed Instance
  4. D
    SQL Server on Azure Virtual Machines with Locally Redundant Storage (LRS)

Answer

Azure SQL Database elastic pools
Azure SQL Database elastic pools allow multiple databases to share a single pool of resources (eDTUs or vCores). This matches the requirements of having 30 databases with unpredictable, non-overlapping usage spikes, optimizing cost and minimizing administrative effort while providing built-in high availability.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Analyze the application requirements.
Requirements include: 30 separate databases, unpredictable/variable usage peaks at different times, shared resources to optimize costs, high availability, minimized administrative overhead, and no requirement for instance-level features.
This establishes the constraints and drivers for selecting the appropriate database service tier.
2
Evaluate the options against administrative overhead and resource sharing.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) options (Azure SQL Database) are preferred over Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) (SQL Server on Azure VMs) to minimize management overhead. Elastic pools allow resources to be shared across multiple databases.
Eliminating VMs reduces patching and maintenance overhead, while choosing shared resources addresses the cost optimization goal.
3
Evaluate the database tier requirements.
Since there are no instance-level compatibility requirements (like SQL Server Agent, CLR, or cross-database queries), Azure SQL Database is preferred over Managed Instance. Specifically, elastic pools fit the multi-database, variable workload scenario perfectly.
This confirms that elastic pools are the most cost-effective and appropriate option that meets all specified constraints.

Key Concept

Selecting the appropriate Azure SQL deployment option based on resource sharing, cost optimization, and compatibility requirements.
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Topics

Relational Data Storage Solutions

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