Is it possible to have a different service tier for the failover elastic pool than the active production database?

Question

I'm considering to change the service tier for my failover elastic pool from Business Critical 4 vCores to General Purpose 4 vCores to make it more budget friendly. First I'm wondering if it's possible to have a different tier for the failover, and in that case what kind of impact will this have? I'm expecting reduced performance for the failover in the case that there's an outage and we need to use the failover, since we will be on a lower tier.

Answer 1

Yes, you can have secondaries (failover database in your question) using a different service tier. However, you should be cautious having the secondary database at a lower performance level than the primary as you need to ensure it has enough capacity to handle the update workload on the primary, otherwise transactions will be queued up for replication and you could lose significant amounts of data in the case of a forced failover.