Have you used a second-level cache in Hibernate in your last project?

Yes, in the last project, I used Hibernate's second-level cache to improve performance for repeated queries to the same data.

The second-level cache stores data between Hibernate sessions, which helps avoid repeated database access for the same entities.

To use it, a cache provider (such as Ehcache, Infinispan) is usually integrated and configured:

spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.cache.use_second_level_cache=true
spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.cache.region.factory_class=org.hibernate.cache.jcache.JCacheRegionFactory

Entities are annotated for caching:

@Entity
@Cacheable
@org.hibernate.annotations.Cache(usage = CacheConcurrencyStrategy.READ_WRITE)
public class Product {
    // fields
}

This helps reduce database load and speeds up application performance, especially during frequent data reads.