Microsoft Azure Solutions Architect Expert AZ-305 Practice Question

An Azure SQL Database elastic pool lets many small databases share a pool of compute and memory resources, allowing each database automatically to use more DTUs or vCores during peak demand and relinquish them when idle-ideal for multi-tenant SaaS workloads with unpredictable, offset usage patterns. Selecting the General Purpose vCore service tier provides balanced performance at the lowest price point that supports elastic pools.

Individual serverless databases would remove manual scaling but managing 200 separate deployments increases operational overhead and could cost more than sharing resources in a pool. A single Azure SQL Managed Instance would require consolidating all schemas, offers no per-tenant isolation, and compute is provisioned for the entire instance, not dynamically per database. Hyperscale targets very large databases; putting all data in one database eliminates tenant isolation and incurs higher cost without benefiting small (<10 GB) workloads. Therefore, an elastic pool on the General Purpose vCore tier best meets the cost, scaling, and manageability requirements.