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Actually, looking at what I wrote I'm wrong in my type-hinting on the Statements class constructor - sorry about that. You'll want to pass just the DatabaseObject object and then call the getDatabaseObject method inside the Statements class. This will avoid my mistake and allow you to create multiple database connection classes that all use a common interface so you can use PDO, MySQLi, etc. as necessary.

Yes, using globals is frowned upon. The reason for this is the lack of any real accountability or pinpointing modification points - if the variable is global, it can be changed literally anywhere and this can lead to days of hunt and seek debugging. The current basic pattern is to either instantiate a concrete instance of the database object and pass it to the other objects that require a database connection or setting up a dependency injection pattern/system, but that's a whole extra level of difficulty. Extending a class is, for the most part, perfectly safe and fine. Now, the presiding opinion is to prefer composition over inheritance which means most modern advice you'll see and read is that you should - as stated above - either use dependency injection or pass an object into the constructor. There's more controversy in that most people apparently have an issue with singletons, but if you always need the same database connection you'll probably want a singleton object that you pass into the constructor methods of any class that needs it. You pass an object to a constructor method in a series of `new` statements. Any time you write, for instance: $db = new DatabaseObject(); you're calling the __construct() method of the DatabaseObject class. So, hopefully this'll help a bit: <?php class DatabaseObject{ private $pdo; public function __construct(){ $this->pdo = new PDO('connection_string', 'username', 'password'); $this->pdo->setAttribute(PDO::WHATEVER); } public function getDatabaseObject(){ return $this->pdo; } } class Statements{ private $pdo; public function __construct(DatabaseObject $dbo){ $this->pdo = $pdo; } } $pdo = new DatabaseObject(); $stmtnt = new Statements($pdo->getDatabaseObject()); A few additional things: You can't access a private variable from anywhere other than the class that defines that variable, even if you're in a child class - in that case you'll want to use protected. Also, in your Database class constructor, you're missing `$this->` on your first line. $this->pdo is a different thing than just $pdo within a class or object. Long story short, there's really no one "way" to do things - best practices adapt and change as we all learn and grow as programmers. Best bet is to do the research you're already doing, really take in and understand the information and opinions in that research, and apply that understanding to the problem you're trying to solve - but remember you (or worse, someone else) will always have to revisit the code you're currently writing later on. Don't make it harder on that person as much as you can.

bananamen, Your solution worked fine. So you had the solution to fix my problem. I am now running MySQL 8 🙂👍

I wrote step by step instructions a few years ago in the Laragon forum on how to upgrade to Mysql8. I assume Laragon is the actual dev on your system and you are not trying to install Mysql outside of Laragon. You will need to register on the forum. See instructions here.... https://forum.laragon.org/topic/2017/mysql-8-upgrade-instructions/2

https://www.google.com/search?q=download+mysql+8 The first few links all looked relevant. If that's not working for you then tell us which page you tried to download from.