Relational Data Storage Design
Data storage design items test Azure SQL, SQL Managed Instance, SQL Server on VMs, PostgreSQL, MySQL, scalability, protection, performance, and cost.
How to study for AZ-305
Treat each AZ-305 item as an architecture decision: identify the workload requirement, governance boundary, data shape, recovery objective, and infrastructure tradeoff before choosing.
Core concepts
Concept 1
Relational Data Storage Design questions test Azure architecture tradeoff decisions rather than isolated service-name recall.
Exam cue: Identify the requirement, workload type, data shape, access boundary, recovery target, and operational ownership model.
Concept 2
The best answer maps business requirements to identity, governance, data, resilience, compute, network, security, cost, and operations constraints.
Exam cue: Choose the Azure design that satisfies the constraint with the least unnecessary operational burden.
Concept 3
Eliminate answers that ignore governance scope, recovery objectives, data durability, private connectivity, security boundaries, or workload fit.
Exam cue: Prefer Well-Architected choices: secure, reliable, cost-aware, observable, governed, and scalable.
Risk pitfalls and guardrails
Choosing a service before identifying the business driver and nonfunctional requirement.
Guardrail: Avoid answers that pick services without checking governance scope, data model, recovery target, migration dependency, or network boundary.
Solving availability while ignoring identity, data protection, compliance, or cost constraints.
Guardrail: Avoid answers that pick services without checking governance scope, data model, recovery target, migration dependency, or network boundary.
Assuming a migration, networking, or storage pattern is correct without checking workload dependencies.
Guardrail: Avoid answers that pick services without checking governance scope, data model, recovery target, migration dependency, or network boundary.
Memory anchors
Azure SQL Database
Azure SQL Database is a managed relational database service for cloud-native SQL workloads.
SQL Managed Instance
SQL Managed Instance provides near full SQL Server compatibility with managed platform operations.
SQL Server on VM
SQL Server on Azure VMs is useful when workload requirements need operating system or instance-level control.
Hyperscale
Azure SQL Hyperscale supports large databases with separated compute and storage scaling.
Elastic Pool
An elastic pool shares compute resources across multiple Azure SQL databases with variable demand.
Read Replica
Read replicas can improve read scalability and regional distribution for supported database services.
Private Endpoint
A private endpoint exposes a database service through private network connectivity.
Database Tier
Database tier selection balances compute, storage, availability, performance, and cost requirements.
Geo Replication
Geo-replication supports regional copies for availability, read scale, or disaster recovery.
Data Protection
Data protection includes encryption, backup, retention, access control, and recovery validation.
Checkpoint rule
Do the check-up only after you can summarize each concept in one sentence and identify one dangerous pitfall from memory.
Knowledge Check (after reading)
Short check-up to confirm understanding of this module.
Check-up Questions
You must migrate a SQL Server database to a fully managed PaaS service that preserves instance-level features like SQL Agent and cross-database queries with minimal code changes. Which option fits?
Your database has intermittent, unpredictable usage with long idle periods, and you want to pay little when it is idle. Which Azure SQL Database option fits?
Answer all questions to submit.
Next step personalized recommendations
Continue learning
Move forward only after this module is stable.
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