Question

Difficulty: MediumDesign Relational Database HA and DR

An enterprise plans to migrate an on-premises relational database to Azure. The database requires native support for SQL Server Agent jobs and cross-database queries. The business continuity requirements for the new architecture are as follows:
- Provide automatic cross-region failover to a secondary region with a Recovery Time Objective (RTO) of less than 1 hour.
- Maintain a single, unchanged connection string for read-write operations during a failover event.
- Offload reporting workloads to a read-only endpoint in the secondary region.

Which two configurations should you recommend in the design?

  1. Create an Azure SQL Managed Instance auto-failover group containing the primary and secondary instances.Answer
  2. Configure the client application to connect using the read-write listener endpoint of the auto-failover group.Answer
  3. C
    Migrate the database to an Azure SQL Database singleton and configure manual active geo-replication to the secondary region.
  4. D
    Configure the standby secondary database to use Standard HDD storage to minimize data replication and storage costs.

Answer

Creating an Azure SQL Managed Instance auto-failover group and configuring the client application to connect using the auto-failover group's read-write listener.
Creating an Azure SQL Managed Instance auto-failover group and configuring the application to connect using the read-write listener endpoint satisfies all requirements. SQL Managed Instance supports on-premises features such as SQL Server Agent and cross-database queries. The auto-failover group manages database replication to the secondary region, supports automatic failover to meet the RTO requirement, and provides a read-write listener endpoint to keep the connection string unchanged, as well as a read-only listener endpoint to offload reporting workloads.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Identify database compatibility requirements.
The application requires SQL Server Agent and cross-database queries, which indicates that Azure SQL Managed Instance is the appropriate relational database service over Azure SQL Database singletons.
To ensure that legacy SQL Server features remain functional after migration to a fully-managed Azure database service.
2
Evaluate regional high availability and disaster recovery options.
Auto-failover groups in Azure SQL Managed Instance provide cross-region replication, automatic failover, and read-write/read-only listener endpoints.
To satisfy the business continuity requirements (automatic failover, RTO < 1 hour, and secondary read-scale routing).
3
Configure connection routing.
Use the read-write listener endpoint in the client connection string.
This allows the application to keep a single connection string without modifications when a failover occurs, while the platform handles redirecting traffic to the primary replica.

Key Concept

Azure SQL Managed Instance auto-failover groups provide cross-region disaster recovery, automatic failover capabilities, and listener endpoints to maintain transparent application connectivity.
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