Question

Difficulty: HardDesign Relational Database HA and DR

A software company is designing a relational database solution in Azure for a critical multi-tenant inventory application. The database architecture must meet the following requirements:
- Provide high availability within the primary region that can survive a datacenter zone outage.
- Replicate database data to a secondary Azure region to support disaster recovery with an RTO of less than 11 hour and an RPO of less than 55 minutes.
- Ensure that client applications can automatically reconnect to the secondary region database during a failover without requiring configuration updates or DNS changes.
- Support routing read-only inventory reports to the secondary region to reduce the load on the primary database.

Which two configurations should you include in the database design to meet these requirements?

  1. Configure an Auto-Failover Group containing the primary database in the primary region and a secondary replica in the paired region.Answer
  2. Deploy the database using the Azure SQL Database Business Critical service tier with zone redundancy enabled.Answer
  3. C
    Configure Active Geo-Replication from the primary database to a secondary database in the paired region.
  4. D
    Deploy the database on SQL Server in Azure Virtual Machines using Standard HDD managed disks for transaction logs.

Answer

Deploy the database on the Azure SQL Database Business Critical tier with zone redundancy enabled, and configure an Auto-Failover Group with read-write and read-only listeners.
To support regional disaster recovery with automatic failover and read-scale routing under a single endpoint, you should configure an Auto-Failover Group. This exposes read-write and read-only listener endpoints that persist through failovers, preventing the need to update client connection strings. Deploying the database on the Business Critical service tier of Azure SQL Database with zone redundancy enabled guarantees high availability that is resilient to availability zone failures within the primary region.

Step-by-Step Solution

1
Evaluate the requirement for local high availability resilient to datacenter zone outages.
By selecting Azure SQL Database on the Business Critical tier and enabling zone redundancy, the primary database replica is spread across different physical zones in the primary region.
This guarantees that the database will remain online even if one of the physical datacenters in the primary region undergoes an outage.
2
Address the disaster recovery, automatic failover, and client reconnection criteria.
Implement an Auto-Failover Group between the primary and secondary regions, which exposes unified read-write and read-only listener endpoints.
Auto-Failover Groups satisfy the RTO and RPO limits through asynchronous replication and handle client redirection automatically, ensuring that client applications do not require connection string updates during a failover.
3
Satisfy the requirement to offload read-only inventory reports to the secondary region.
Utilize the read-only listener of the Auto-Failover Group to route analytical and reporting queries directly to the secondary replica database.
This offloads read operations from the primary transactional database, maximizing performance and efficiency.

Key Concept

Designing relational database high availability and disaster recovery using Azure SQL Database features like zone redundancy and Auto-Failover Groups.
Estimated Time:2m 0s
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