Maintaining database views in mysql is sometimes cumbersome. When you change a referred table you have to alter the table and there is no clean way to do that in migrations (DB::unprepared()
). I guess using query scopes in models is more maintainable. Isn't it? Does it has negative effect on the performance.
I don't know how big your project is and I don't have many elements to judge this situation perfectly.
However, working with views means depending on the underlying database system. Obviously it has its pros and cons, but I would prefer to decouple my software components.
What if you change, in the future, switching from MySQL to MongoDB?
Maybe, you could use a cache system, like Redis or Memcached (and Laravel already has a ready-to-use service for it).
As I told you before, I am making this suggestion basically because I think about the software scalability and components decoupling.
Here you can learn about the basic use of the Cache Service: http://laravel.com/docs/5.1/cache
Also, if you have some confidence with design patterns, you can implement a really elegant solution using some stacked repositories alongside the decorator pattern.
You can find some interesting articles about the topic here:
Yes, they're about Laravel 4 but the concept can be easily adopted in a Laravel 5.* project.
Hope it was useful!
EDIT: as I told in the following comments, if you don't want to start with something like Redis or Memcached, you can always use the filesystem-based Cache.