In a Spring Boot application, you can handle exceptions thrown during the data binding process by implementing a global exception handler using the @ControllerAdvice annotation. This approach allows you to centralize exception handling for all data binding-related exceptions and provide consistent error responses. The other options are not recommended practices for handling data binding exceptions in Spring Boot applications.

To develop web applications in Spring Boot, the recommended starter is "spring-boot-starter-web." This starter includes everything needed to set up a basic web application, including embedded Tomcat and Spring MVC. The other starters mentioned serve different purposes like data access, monitoring, and logging but are not specific to web development.

To secure a large-scale Spring Boot application with microservices efficiently, it's advisable to use OAuth2 with JWT tokens. This approach provides centralized authentication and authorization while allowing secure access to services. The other options have security and efficiency drawbacks, such as storing credentials in plaintext or using HTTP Basic Authentication, which are not recommended for production scenarios.

To handle different HTTP methods in a single method of a Spring Boot controller, you can use the @RequestMapping annotation with the method parameter. This allows you to specify which HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE, etc.) should be mapped to that method. Inside the method, you can use conditional logic to perform different actions based on the incoming HTTP method.

To implement password rotation while maintaining security, you should follow best practices like using a strong hashing algorithm, enforcing a secure password policy, and implementing a scheduled task to rotate passwords. Storing expiration dates in plaintext or using weak hashing would compromise security.

If you want to specify that a configuration will be applied only if a specific class is present, you would use the @ConditionalOnClass annotation in Spring Boot. This annotation allows you to conditionally apply a configuration based on the presence of a specified class in the classpath. It helps in creating flexible and conditional configurations.

To optimize the performance of Spring Data JPA repositories when dealing with large datasets, it's crucial to write custom queries using the @Query annotation. This allows you to fine-tune the SQL queries and fetch only the necessary data, minimizing the overhead of retrieving large datasets. Other options may be relevant in different contexts, but they do not directly address the issue of optimizing performance with large datasets.

In Spring Boot, you can optimize configuration loading during testing by using the @Profile annotation in test classes. This allows you to specify which profiles should be active during testing, overriding the application's default profile. Option (1) is not the preferred way for testing. Option (4) is incorrect as it is used to set the default profile, not for testing purposes. Option (3) is incorrect; profiles can indeed be optimized for testing.

In Spring Boot, the @ConditionalOnBean annotation is used to create a condition based on the presence or absence of a specific bean in the application context. This allows you to configure certain components or behavior only if a particular bean is defined, making it a powerful tool for conditional configuration.

In Spring Data JPA, when the derived query mechanism is not sufficient, you can annotate a custom query method with the @Query annotation. This annotation allows you to define custom queries using JPQL or native SQL. There's no @CustomQuery annotation in Spring Data JPA, and the other options mentioned are not standard annotations for this purpose.