Question

A financial services company runs a mission-critical OLTP workload on a single Azure SQL Database using the General Purpose service tier with 8 vCores. During month-end processing, monitoring shows sustained CPU utilization above 95% and query timeouts, while log write throughput and storage IOPS remain well within limits. The workload runs continuously with a predictable, steady load. You must improve query performance during peak periods while keeping costs as predictable as possible. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Scale up to a higher number of vCores in the provisioned compute tier.

Answer

Migrate the database to the serverless compute tier and configure auto-pause after 1 hour of inactivity.

Answer

Switch the database to the Business Critical service tier without changing the vCore count.

Answer

Enable read scale-out and redirect month-end reporting queries to a read-only replica.