It is designed to provide an authoritative DNS service.
In the context of DNS, an authoritative server is responsible for providing answers to DNS queries about domain names within the zones it manages, essentially serving as the definitive source of information for those domains.
Unlike a DNS recursor, which forwards queries to other servers, an authoritative server only answers queries for domains it has direct knowledge of
This means that if you only use the PowerDNS Authoritative Server service, it won't be able to resolve unknown domains.
To do this, you need to install the recursor service