Azure SQL administration: migration and operations

Objectives and progression

Initial DP-300 course with eight lessons and 48 original decisions, including eight fictional APS and technical-management cases. Internal assessment of 32 decisions in 70 minutes. Regular questions span five domains within published weight ranges. Official exam Portuguese is Brazilian. Executed labs and greater depth remain necessary. DP-300: English outline effective 2026-04-24, with an update announced for 2026-10-27. The live guide already shows October; indexed official April text was compared with it: 99 bullets each, changing VBS enclaves to secure enclaves with unchanged weights. Exam duration is 100 minutes; 700 on the 1–1000 scale is not 70%. Exact question count is unconfirmed.

Audience: DBAs, APS/L3 teams, cloud engineers, and technical managers operating SQL services.

Prerequisites: SQL, networking, Azure identity, and database-operation fundamentals.

430 estimated study minutes

• Choose an offering around the application and plan a verifiable cutover.
• Separate Azure management, SQL authorization, and data protection.
• Choose controls by the property they actually provide.
• Investigate regressions and blocking using history and transaction context.
• Connect plans, statistics, and integrity controls to observed service behavior.
• Define job identity, scope, idempotency, and evidence.
• Plan recovery around the data point and actual dependencies.
• Decide failover using RPO/RTO and validate the application path.

Modules

1. Platform, capacity, and migration
2. Identity, networking, and encryption
3. Sensitive data and evidence
4. Query Store and concurrency
5. Queries, integrity, and monitoring
6. Automation and safe resumption
7. Backups, keys, and PITR
8. HA, DR, and RUN handover

Continue learning

Databases

• SQL
• AZ-104 — Azure Administrator
• Oracle Database Administration
• Production Support L3

References and version

DP-300 English objectives effective 2026-04-24

• Azure Database Administrator Associate: format and transition · 2026-09-30
• DP-300 current and announced objective outlines · 2026-09-30
• Microsoft technical exam scaled scoring · 2026-09-30
• Azure SQL service choices · 2026-09-30
• Elastic pools and aggregate demand · 2026-09-30
• Serverless compute and auto pause · 2026-09-30
• Migration to Managed Instance · 2026-09-30
• Table partitioning · 2026-09-30
• Compression resource trade-offs · 2026-09-30
• Database users and privileges · 2026-09-30
• Resource management versus SQL permissions · 2026-09-30
• Private endpoints and DNS · 2026-09-30
• Private endpoint and public access settings · 2026-09-30
• Always Encrypted and key separation · 2026-09-30
• VBS and SGX enclave prerequisites · 2026-09-30
• Customer managed TDE protection · 2026-09-30
• Historical keys and backup restore · 2026-09-30
• Masking limitations · 2026-09-30
• Row level predicates and session context · 2026-09-30
• Audit evidence · 2026-09-30
• Ledger digest trust boundary · 2026-09-30
• Query Store history and plans · 2026-09-30
• Query Store storage and collection state · 2026-09-30
• Automatic tuning by service · 2026-09-30
• Blocking chains and transactions · 2026-09-30
• Deadlock cycles and victims · 2026-09-30
• Index design and SARGable predicates · 2026-09-30
• Cardinality estimates and statistics · 2026-09-30
• Integrity checks and repair risk · 2026-09-30
• Database watcher preview and data store · 2026-09-30
• Watcher identity and access · 2026-09-30
• Automation service boundaries · 2026-09-30
• SQL Agent jobs in Managed Instance · 2026-09-30
• Elastic job identities retries and idempotency · 2026-09-30
• Bicep preview versus deployment · 2026-09-30
• Managed backups and redundancy · 2026-09-30
• PITR and geo restore · 2026-09-30
• Long term selected backup retention · 2026-09-30
• Failover groups and listener endpoints · 2026-09-30
• Planned and forced failover decisions · 2026-09-30
• AG FCI and log shipping · 2026-09-30
• Zonal and regional resilience · 2026-09-30