How to create a hit counter for each published node to find out how often a specific node has been viewed?
There is a settings page at admin/reports/settings, try looking there first.

Also, look in the node_counter table instead of accesslog.  The query should actually be as follows ($nid being the node ID of the node which you want records for).:

SELECT totalcount FROM {node_counter} WHERE nid = $nid;


On another note, I'm pretty sure if you enable the Statistics module, you can simply pull the node's page view count out in Views.