How to scale out read only replica in SQL Manage instance for business critical tier?

Question

In production we have SQL MI with business critical tier. As of now we used azure default read only replica for application to use read only query using "ApplicationIntent=ReadOnly" connection parameter.

Now we are planning to interduce new reporting tool so we need to add one more read only replica to intact performance of application.

For this we have following questions.
[1] How we can scale out one more read only replica for SQL MI?
[2] How we can differentiate connection between readonly replica1 and replica2.
[3] Is this required Geo replication features?
[4] What is additional cost for this?

We need something like below link.
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/azure-sql/database/read-scale-out

Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Nikunj

Answer 1

@Nikunj Patel

According to this document the read replica is definitely by default but it can have 0-4 replicas with geo-replication

The cost is the 100 percent of the primary DB. So basically the cost for each replica will be same as cost for Primary DB.

Please check the geo replication document and get back to us for any questions.

Regards
Navtej S