DP-203 Question #223: Real Exam Question with Answer & Explanation

Question

A company is planning on creating an Azure SQL database to support a mission critical application. The application needs to be highly available and not have any performance degradation during maintenance windows. Which of the following technologies can be used to implement this solution? (Choose 3)

Options

• APremium Service Tier
• BVirtual Machine Scale Sets
• CBasic Service Tier
• DSQL Data Sync
• EAlways On Availability Groups
• FZone-redundant configuration

Explanation

Premium Service Tier (A) uses a local SSD-based architecture with built-in Always On technology, ensuring zero performance degradation during maintenance by seamlessly failing over to a secondary replica. Always On Availability Groups (E) maintain readable secondary replicas so traffic continues uninterrupted when the primary undergoes maintenance - this is the foundational HA mechanism Azure SQL uses under the hood. Zone-redundant configuration (F) distributes replicas across multiple Availability Zones, so a zonal maintenance event or outage doesn't impact the database.

Why the others are wrong:

• B (VM Scale Sets) is an IaaS compute-scaling feature with no relevance to Azure SQL Database HA
• C (Basic Tier) uses remote storage with limited SLAs and does not support zone-redundancy or premium HA features - it's for dev/test, not mission-critical workloads
• D (SQL Data Sync) is a data replication/sync tool for multi-database consistency; it introduces latency and is not an HA mechanism

Memory tip: Think "PAZ" - Premium tier + Always On + Zone-redundant. If a question mentions "mission-critical" + "no degradation during maintenance," you need all three PAZ components working together.

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