Imagine you are developing a Spring Boot application with a read-heavy database workload. How would you optimize the application and database connectivity to handle high read requests efficiently?

In a read-heavy scenario, using a caching mechanism like Redis can significantly improve performance by reducing the load on the database server. By caching frequently accessed data, you can serve read requests from the cache, reducing the database load. Database sharding is more relevant for write-heavy workloads, and increasing write capacity and implementing asynchronous processing are not specific to optimizing read-heavy workloads.