ASP.NET - Storing Article View Count in Database

[pitlord]

I am building a Wiki / Blog similar application, and I have a question about the best way to store the View Count for each of the articles. The requirement is that I only want to store the unique number of users that viewed the article and not the total view count. So far I have come up with 3 different ways to accomplish:1. SQL Server stored procedure: the problem with this approach is that the data is stored in XML data type and it might be a bit complicated to achieve the requirement using this method. I am leaving this as a last resort.2. MSMQ: this would work great, since I can process the requests serially. The only problem with this approach is that, I cannot ensure that MSMQ is installed on the host server. This one is out of the question!3. Using \[code\]Application.Lock()\[/code\]: I know that using this method I can lock access to the \[code\]Application\[/code\] object, update some entry in the application, update the database, and then call \[code\]Application.Unlock()\[/code\]. While this sounds as a functional approach, it still feels like a workaround.Does anyone has a suggestion on what I should do to achieve the requirement?