Case Study 1 - Contoso
Existing Environment
Azure Environment
Contoso has an Azure subscription in North Europe that contains the corporate infrastructure.
The current infrastructure contains a Microsoft SQL Server 2017 database. The database contains the following tables.

The FeedbackJsoncolumn has a full-text index and stores JSON documents in the following format.

The support staff at Contoso never has the UNMASKpermission.
Problem Statements
Contoso is deploying a new Azure SQL database that will become the authoritative data store for the following:
* AI workloads
* Vector search
* Modernized API access
* Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines
Sometimes the ingestion pipeline fails due to malformed JSON and duplicate payloads.
The engineers at Contoso report that the following dashboard query runs slowly.

You review the execution plan and discover that the plan shows a clustered index scan.
VehicleIncidentReportsoften contains details about the weather, traffic conditions, and location. Analysts report that it is difficult to find similar incidents based on these details.
Requirements
Planned Changes
Contoso wants to modernize Fleet Intelligence Platform to support AI-powered semantic search over incident reports.
Security Requirements
Contoso identifies the following security requirements:
* Restrict the support staff from viewing Personally Identifiable Information (PII) data, which is full email addresses and phone numbers.
* Enforce row-level filtering so that analysts see only incidents for the fleets to which they are assigned. The analysts can be assigned to multiple fleets.
Database Performance and Requirements
Contoso identifies the following telemetry requirements:
* Telemetry data must be stored in a partitioned table.
* Telemetry data must provide predictable performance for ingestion and retention operations.
* latitude, longitude, and accuracyJSON properties must be filtered by using an index seek.
Contoso identifies the following maintenance data requirements:
* Ensure that any changes to a row in the MaintenanceEventstable updates the corresponding value in the LastModifiedUtccolumn to the time of the change.
* Avoid recursive updates.
AI Search, Embeddings, and Vector Indexing
Contoso plans to implement semantic search over incident data to meet the following requirements:
* Embeddings must be stored in dedicated Azure SQL Database tables.
* Embeddings must be generated from rich natural language fields.
* Chunking must preserve semantic coherence.
* Hybrid search must combine the following:
- Vector similarity
- Keyword filtering or boosting
Development Requirements
The development team at Contoso will use Microsoft Visual Studio Code and GitHub Copilot and will retrieve live metadata from the databases.
Contoso identifies the following requirements for querying data in the FeedbackJsoncolumn of the CustomerFeedbacktable:
* Extract the customer feedback text from the JSON document.
* Filter rows where the JSON text contains a keyword.
* Calculate a fuzzy similarity score between the feedback text and a known issue description.
* Order the results by similarity score, with the highest score first.
Hotspot Question
You are creating a table that will store customer profiles.
You have the following Transact-SQL code.

For each of the following statements, select Yes if the statement is true. Otherwise, select No.
NOTE: Each correct selection is worth one point.

Hotspot Question
You have an Azure AI Search service and an index named hotels that includes a vector field named DescriptionVector.
You query hotels by using the Search Documents REST API.
You add semantic ranking to the hybrid search query and discover that some queries return fewer results than expected, and captions and answers are missing.
You need to complete the hybrid search request to meet the following requirements:
- Include more documents when ranking.
- Always include captions and answers.
How should you complete the REST request body? To answer, select the appropriate options in the answer area.
NOTE: Each correct selection is worth one point.

You have an Azure SQL database named ProductsDB.
You deploy Data API builder (DAB) to Azure Container Apps by using the
mcr.microsoft.com/azure-databases /data-api-builder:latest image.
The container app has the following configurations:
- Secrets: mssql-connection-string, dab-config-base64
- Environment variables:
- MSSQL_CONNECTION_STRING=secretref:mssql-connection-string
- DAB_CONFIG_BASE64=secretref:dab-config-base64
- Ingress: External on port 5000
Users report that the /health endpoint returns a healthy response, but all requests that query an entity named Products fail and generate a connection error.
You confirm that the SQL login in the connection string is correct and the database exists.
You need to ensure that the container app can establish connections to the Azure SQL logical server without changing the container app deployment settings or the DAB configuration file.
What should you do on the Azure SQL logical server?

Note: This question is part of a series of questions that present the same scenario. Each question in the series contains a unique solution that might meet the stated goals. Some question sets might have more than one correct solution, while others might not have a correct solution.
After you answer a question in this section, you will NOT be able to return to it. As a result, these questions will not appear in the review screen.
You have an SDK-style SQL database project stored in a Git repository. The project targets an Azure SQL database.
The CI build fails with unresolved reference errors when the project references system objects.
You need to update the SQL database project to ensure that dotnet buildvalidates successfully by including the correct system objects in the database model for Azure SQL Database.
Solution: Add an artifact reference to the Azure SQL Database master.dacpac file.
Does this meet the goal?

Hotspot Question
You have an Azure SQL database that has Query Store enabled.
Query Performance Insight shows that one stored procedure has the longest runtime. The procedure runs the following parameterized query.

The dbo.Orders table has approximately 120 million rows. CustomerId is highly selective, and OrderDate is used for range filtering and sorting.
You have the following indexes:
- Clustered index: PK_Orders on (OrderId)
- Nonclustered index: IX_Orders_OrderDate on (OrderDate) with no
included columns
An actual execution plan captured from Query Store for slow runs shows the following:
- An index seek on IX_Orders_OrderDate followed by a Key Lookup
(Clustered) on PK_Orders for CustomerId, Status, and TotalAmount
- A sort operator before Top (50), because the results are ordered by
OrderDate DESC
For each of the following statements, select Yes if the statement is true. Otherwise, select No.
NOTE: Each correct selection is worth one point.