Do you always use a second-level cache in Hibernate?

Question

Do you always use a second-level cache in Hibernate or do you first try it without and only use it when the performance goes down?

Answer 1

Make it work first, then make it fast. If you don't need caching, don't implement it.

Answer 2

In the applications where I've been, the database is shared among several applications, some of them are not Java at all. So, the second-level cache is not an option for me in these situations, because I never know when some other app can update the db.