Describe Considerations for Working with Non-Relational Data on Azure – DP-900 Study Guide
This domain accounts for 15–20% of the exam — the smallest slice, but a reliable-scoring one because the services have clear, distinct jobs. It covers the three Azure Storage services you must recognize (Blob, Files, Table) and Azure Cosmos DB with its multiple APIs. Almost every question here is "match the scenario to the right non-relational store," so this guide is organized around those distinctions.
Azure Storage Services
Azure Storage bundles several services under a storage account. Three are on the exam:
Azure Blob Storage — object storage for unstructured data: images, video, backups, logs, and data-lake files. Accessed over HTTP/REST. Key features:
- Access tiers: Hot (frequent), Cool (infrequent, ≥30 days), Archive (rare, offline — rehydration takes hours).
- Lifecycle management: rules that automatically move blobs to cheaper tiers over time.
- Massive scale at low cost.
Azure Files — fully managed file shares over SMB (and NFS), mountable like a network drive by Windows, Linux, and macOS. The lift-and-shift answer: an app expecting \\server\share keeps working with the share hosted in Azure — no code changes.
Azure Table Storage — a NoSQL key-value store. Each entity is addressed by a partition key + row key, and carries flexible (schemaless) properties. No joins, no foreign keys. Cheap store for large volumes of simple structured entities.
The core discriminator:
- Unstructured objects over HTTP → Blob.
- Mountable share with file-system semantics → Files.
- Simple key-addressed entities → Table.
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