In a new post to his site Joe Ferguson has included a screencast showing how to add MySQL 8 support to Laravel Homestead for your local development.

My friend Beau Simensen has been doing awesome stuff building and streaming his work on astrocasts.com. He’s inspired me to start streaming again and last night I spent some time adding a feature to Laravel Homestead to add MySQL 8 as an option.

In the video Joe walks through the whole process including how Homestead is set up (via Vagrant) and all of the configuration changes you'll need to make to get MySQL 8 support up and running. The video runs about an hour and a half but it's a great resource if you're looking to use this latest version of MySQL in your application.

On the Symfony Finland site they cover a recent announcement from MySQL about the release of their latest version: MySQL 8.0. In this post they cover some of the new features and performance improvements that come with this new version.

The MySQL development team has announced the General Availability of the MySQL 8.0.0 Open Source database.

This is the version following MySQL 5.7 that was released in late 2015 with interesting features like extensive JSON field support. Plenty of work has gone into this version as well and in an introductory post goes in-depth into all the enhancements.

The post includes a listing of eight topics (ironically) for the new updates including:

• Support for Window functions, Common Table Expressions, NOWAIT and SKIP LOCKED, Descending Indexes, Grouping, Regular Expressions, Character Sets, Cost Model, and Histograms (SQL)
• Geography support. Spatial Reference Systems (SRS), as well as SRS aware spatial datatypes, spatial indexes, and spatial functions.
• Remote management, Undo tablespace management, and new instant DDL.
• OpenSSL improvements, new default authentication, SQL Roles, breaking up the super privilege, password strength, and more.

Check out the rest of this post for more of the overview or MySQL's official announcement for the full details.