AZ-305 Practice Question 26: Database Compliance Retention
Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305) · Test 3 · question 6 of 10
A clinical trials company stores results in an Azure SQL Database. The regulator requires that one full backup per month be retrievable for seven years, and one full backup per year be retrievable for ten years. The operations team separately needs to restore the database to any point in the last month when a bad release corrupts data. The company wants no additional infrastructure to build or run.
Which backup design should you recommend?
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Answer:
The two requirements map to the two built-in mechanisms. Point-in-time restore covers the operational need, using automatic backups within a short-term retention period of 1 to 35 days. Long-term retention covers the regulatory need: it copies specified full backups into redundant blob storage under a policy expressed as weekly, monthly, and yearly parameters, for up to 10 years. Setting M = 84 months and Y = 10 years is exactly the regulator's requirement, and it is a policy setting on the database, nothing to build or operate.
Option A is not possible. The short-term retention period for point-in-time restore is limited to 35 days; ten years cannot be expressed there, which is precisely why long-term retention exists as a separate policy.
Option C reimplements the feature and loses fidelity. A BACPAC is a logical export, not a transactionally consistent database backup unless the database is quiesced first, and the company would own and maintain a runbook, its credentials, and its failure handling for the next decade.
Option D confuses replication with retention. A geo-replicated secondary continuously reflects the current state of the primary, so a corruption or deletion is replicated to it within seconds. It provides no historical point to restore from and therefore satisfies neither the seven-year nor the ten-year requirement.
Reference: Long-term retention backups in Azure SQL Database