On the Sticher.io blog Brent has written up a post covering the use of MySQL views in Eloquent, the database ORM that's included with the Laravel framework.

MySQL views are a way of storing queries on the database level, and producing virtual tables with them. In this post we'll look at why you want to use them and how they can be integrated in Laravel with Eloquent models.

If you're already convinced of the power of MySQL views, or just want to know how to implement them in Laravel, you're free to skip ahead.

For those not familiar with the concept of "views" in MySQL, he spends a little time explaining what they are and what benefits they bring to the table. This includes a code example of a migration to create one and how something similar could be achieved with event hooks on a Laravel model. He then gets into the use of the views with Laravel, refactoring a more complex SELECT query into a view and creating/removing it using the same migration methods as any other table in the database.