AZ-305 Practice Question 4: Relational Tier Selection
Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305) · Test 1 · question 4 of 10
A SaaS provider runs a single multi-tenant OLTP database on Azure SQL Database. The database is currently 3.6 TB and grows by roughly 400 GB each month, and the business plans for it to pass 40 TB within three years. The architecture review sets these requirements:
- Storage must keep growing without repartitioning the application or migrating to a new tier. - A full restore for a failed release must complete in minutes, not in hours proportional to database size. - Four analytics teams each need an isolated read-only endpoint whose compute can be sized, and paid for, independently of the primary. - The solution must stay a fully managed platform service.
Which service tier should the design specify?
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Answer:
Hyperscale decouples the database engine from a distributed storage layer. Storage grows automatically from 10 GB up to 128 TB with no max-size to pre-declare, so the 40 TB projection is absorbed without a re-platforming project. Because backup and restore are file-snapshot based, they are nearly instantaneous regardless of data volume, exactly the "restore in minutes" the release process needs. And Hyperscale supports up to 30 named replicas, each with its own independently configurable compute size and its own connection endpoint, which is precisely the isolated, separately sized analytics endpoint the four teams asked for. Microsoft now positions Hyperscale as the default tier for new and modernizing OLTP and HTAP workloads.
Option A fails on the first requirement outright: Business Critical caps storage at 4 TB, which the database reaches in about a month. It also offers only a single built-in read scale-out replica, shared by every read-only session, so the four teams could not be isolated from each other or sized separately.
Option B fails on the same storage ceiling, General Purpose also tops out at 4 TB, and General Purpose has no read scale-out replicas at all. Serverless changes how compute is billed; it does not change the storage limit.
Option D is the right shape of answer for an instance-scoped lift-and-shift, but not for this scenario. The Hyperscale tier isn't available for SQL Managed Instance, Business Critical instance storage is far below the multi-tens-of-terabytes target, and Managed Instance restores are size-of-data operations that grow with the database rather than staying in minutes.
Reference: What is the Hyperscale service tier?