Design data storage solutions

A financial services firm stores nightly database backup files (each 200-500 GB) in Azure Blob Storage. The files are rarely read again unless a restore is needed, but regulators require that the backups survive a complete regional disaster and that any single file can be individually restored to a paired region within the SLA. The firm wants to minimize storage cost while meeting these durability and recoverability requirements. Which storage configuration should you recommend?

A media company stores thousands of raw video files in Azure Blob Storage. After a project completes, its footage is rarely accessed but must be retained for at least seven years for contractual reasons. When occasionally needed, a file must be retrievable within a few hours, and retrieval latency is acceptable. The company wants to minimize storage costs for this long-term retained footage. Which storage tier should you recommend for the completed-project footage?

A retail company operates several transactional systems: an on-premises SQL Server, an Azure SQL Database, and a SaaS CRM exposed only through a REST API. Analysts need a governed, code-optional way to ingest and transform data from all three sources on a scheduled basis, land it in a data lake, and then run large-scale analytical queries and Power BI reports. The team has limited engineering resources and wants to minimize infrastructure management while supporting orchestrated pipelines with a visual authoring experience. Which combination of Azure services should you recommend?

A retail company runs an on-premises SQL Server order-management system and an Azure SQL Database for its e-commerce site. The analytics team needs a near real-time consolidated view of orders in Azure Synapse Analytics with minimal impact on the source systems. New and changed rows must be captured continuously (not via nightly full loads), and the solution should require minimal custom code. Which data integration approach should you recommend?

A retail analytics team stores several terabytes of Parquet and CSV files in an Azure Data Lake Storage Gen2 account. Data analysts need to run occasional ad-hoc SQL queries directly against these files without loading the data into a database first. Query frequency is irregular—sometimes several times a day, sometimes nothing for a week. The team wants to minimize cost by paying only for the data processed by each query and avoid managing any provisioned infrastructure. Which solution should you recommend?

A media company stores critical unstructured video assets in Azure Blob Storage in the East US region. Compliance requires that the data survive a complete regional outage and that the company be able to read the data from a secondary region even while the primary region is unavailable. The team also wants to minimize storage cost while meeting these requirements. Which storage redundancy option should you recommend?

A financial services company runs an on-premises SQL Server 2019 database that uses Transparent Data Encryption (TDE), cross-database queries, SQL Server Agent jobs, and a small amount of Common Language Runtime (CLR) assemblies for custom aggregation. They want to migrate to a fully managed Azure PaaS relational service with the least amount of application refactoring, while preserving these instance-level features. Which service should you recommend?

A software company runs 40 internal line-of-business databases on Azure SQL Database for development and test environments. Each database is small (under 20 GB) and is actively queried only during business hours on weekdays; outside those hours the databases are idle. Management wants to minimize compute costs while keeping the databases immediately usable without manual intervention. Which deployment option should you recommend?

A financial services company runs a mission-critical order-processing workload on Azure SQL Database in the Business Critical tier. Analysts increasingly run large, complex reporting queries directly against the production database, and these queries are causing latency spikes and blocking for the transactional workload. The company wants to enable near-real-time analytics on the operational data without impacting transactional performance, and without building and maintaining a separate ETL pipeline. Which solution should you recommend?

A retail company runs its transactional workload on an Azure SQL Database. The analytics team needs near real-time reporting over this operational data using a lakehouse and Power BI, without impacting the performance of the production OLTP database and without building and maintaining custom ETL pipelines. Which approach should you recommend?

A financial services company is migrating a departmental line-of-business SQL Server database to Azure SQL Database. The application team has predictable, steady workloads and wants a purchasing model that lets them independently scale compute and storage, apply Azure Hybrid Benefit to reuse existing SQL Server licenses, and choose specific hardware configurations. Which purchasing model should you recommend?

A SaaS company runs 400 separate Azure SQL databases, one per customer tenant. Each tenant's workload is unpredictable and bursty: at any given moment only about 20 databases are active while the rest are idle. The finance team wants to minimize total cost without provisioning peak capacity for every database individually, while still allowing any tenant to burst when needed. Which storage design should you recommend?

A financial services company runs a single Azure SQL Database that has grown to 3 TB and continues to expand by roughly 200 GB per month. Leadership requires that the database support future growth well beyond 4 TB, provide near-instantaneous backups regardless of database size, and allow rapid point-in-time restores to meet strict recovery objectives. The workload is transactional and cannot tolerate the downtime of migrating to a different platform. Which service tier should you recommend?

A financial services company is migrating a legacy on-premises application that uses SQL Server. The application relies heavily on SQL Server Agent jobs, cross-database queries between three databases on the same instance, and Common Language Runtime (CLR) assemblies. The company wants to move to a PaaS offering with minimal code changes while still getting automated patching and built-in high availability. Which Azure service should you recommend?

A financial services company is migrating a mission-critical on-premises SQL Server 2016 database to Azure. The database relies heavily on SQL Server Agent jobs, cross-database transactions, Database Mail, and CLR assemblies. The team wants a fully managed PaaS solution that requires minimal application refactoring while preserving these instance-level features. Which storage service should you recommend?

A financial trading platform requires a fully managed relational database in Azure for its order-matching engine. The workload has extremely high transaction throughput with strict low-latency requirements, needs zone-redundant high availability with a 99.995% SLA, and benefits significantly from in-memory OLTP and read-scale-out capabilities. Cost is a secondary concern compared to performance and availability. Which Azure SQL Database service tier and configuration should you recommend?

A financial services company runs a customer-facing web application backed by Azure SQL Database in the East US region. The database experiences heavy read traffic from reporting dashboards that must not affect the performance of transactional writes. The company also needs the database to survive a full regional outage with an RPO of near-zero and an RTO of under one hour, and they want read replicas positioned close to users in West Europe. Which solution should you recommend?

A company is migrating a mission-critical application from an on-premises PostgreSQL 14 database to Azure. The database is 800 GB and uses several PostgreSQL-specific extensions, including PostGIS for geospatial queries. The solution must provide zone-redundant high availability with an automatic failover SLA of at least 99.99%, support the required extensions, and minimize administrative overhead such as patching and backups. Which Azure service should you recommend?

A SaaS analytics company runs a multi-tenant PostgreSQL workload on-premises. The largest tenant table has grown to 12 TB, and both transactional inserts and large analytical aggregation queries have become slow because a single node can no longer handle the volume. The team wants a managed Azure service that horizontally scales storage and compute across multiple nodes by distributing (sharding) tables, while keeping full PostgreSQL compatibility so their existing application queries continue to work. Which storage solution should you recommend?

A financial services company runs a mission-critical application on Azure SQL Database (single database, Business Critical tier). Compliance auditors require that the company be able to restore the database to any point in time within the last 24 hours to recover from accidental data corruption, and also retain a full weekly backup for 7 years for regulatory purposes. The architect must recommend a data protection approach that meets both requirements while minimizing operational overhead. What should the architect recommend?