You have an Azure SQL database named SalesDB that contains a table named dbo.

The correct answer is B because the problem is not the vector search operator itself. The problem is that embeddings are becoming stale when article content changes . Microsoft documents that change data capture (CDC) tracks insert, update, and delete operations on source tables, which makes it the right mechanism to identify only the rows that changed.

This also best satisfies the requirement to minimize CPU usage on SalesDB . With CDC, the database only records the row changes, and the embedding regeneration work can be moved to an external process such as an Azure Functions app. That avoids running embedding generation inline inside the database for every update and avoids repeatedly recalculating embeddings for unchanged rows. In contrast, an hourly full-table regeneration would be extremely wasteful on a table with two million frequently updated articles, and a trigger that calls embedding generation per row would push expensive AI work into the transactional path of the database.

Option A is incorrect because changing from VECTOR_SEARCH to VECTOR_DISTANCE does not regenerate embeddings; it only changes the retrieval method. Microsoft states that VECTOR_SEARCH is the ANN search function, while VECTOR_DISTANCE performs exact distance calculation, so neither option addresses stale embedding data.

So the right design is:

use CDC to detect only changed articles,

process those changes outside the database,

regenerate embeddings only for changed rows,

write back the refreshed embeddings for current semantic search results.