AZ-301 Data & Storage Architecture 1 — Questions and Answers
Question 1: A company needs to store petabytes of unstructured data (images, videos, backups) in Azure with the lowest possible storage cost for data accessed less than once per month. Which storage tier should be used?
- Hot tier
- Cool tier
- Archive tier (Correct answer)
- Premium tier
Correct answer: Archive tier
Azure Blob Storage Archive tier offers the lowest storage cost but with highest access latency and costs, designed for data rarely accessed over months or years.
Question 2: An architect needs to design a data lake solution on Azure that supports structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data with hierarchical namespaces for efficient analytics. Which service should be used?
- Azure Blob Storage
- Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 (Correct answer)
- Azure Files
- Azure Table Storage
Correct answer: Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2
Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 combines Azure Blob Storage with hierarchical namespace support, optimized for big data analytics with POSIX-like permissions.
Question 3: A company requires a managed relational database service on Azure with 99.99% SLA, built-in high availability across availability zones, and automatic backups without managing infrastructure. Which service is most appropriate?
- SQL Server on Azure VMs
- Azure SQL Database (General Purpose)
- Azure SQL Database (Business Critical) (Correct answer)
- Azure SQL Managed Instance
Correct answer: Azure SQL Database (Business Critical)
Azure SQL Database Business Critical tier provides 99.99% SLA with local SSD storage and automatic failover across availability zones for highest availability.
Question 4: When designing a multi-model database solution that needs to store and query data as documents, graphs, key-value pairs, and wide-column tables in a single globally distributed service, which Azure service should be used?
- Azure SQL Database
- Azure Cosmos DB (Correct answer)
- Azure Table Storage
- Azure Cache for Redis
Correct answer: Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB is a globally distributed multi-model database supporting document, graph, key-value, table, and column-family APIs in a single service.
Question 5: An architect needs to migrate a SQL Server database to Azure with minimal code changes, while needing features like SQL Agent, cross-database queries, and linked servers not supported in Azure SQL Database. Which service should be recommended?
- Azure SQL Database
- Azure SQL Managed Instance (Correct answer)
- SQL Server on Azure VMs
- Azure Synapse Analytics
Correct answer: Azure SQL Managed Instance
Azure SQL Managed Instance provides near 100% SQL Server compatibility including SQL Agent, cross-database queries, and linked servers in a fully managed PaaS service.
Question 6: A company needs to implement change data capture (CDC) for their Azure SQL Database to stream real-time changes to downstream analytics systems. Which Azure service provides this capability natively?
- Azure Data Factory with polling
- Azure SQL Database with CDC enabled feeding Azure Event Hubs (Correct answer)
- Azure Stream Analytics with SQL input
- Azure Synapse Analytics
Correct answer: Azure SQL Database with CDC enabled feeding Azure Event Hubs
Azure SQL Database supports CDC that captures row-level changes which can be fed to Azure Event Hubs for real-time streaming to downstream consumers.
AZ-301 Data & Storage Architecture 1
A company needs to store petabytes of unstructured data (images, videos, backups) in Azure with the lowest possible storage cost for data accessed less than once per month.
Which storage tier should be used?