Best table schema to store daily hits for many items?
If performance of the site is a concern, then I would suggest going a third route.

Each time a page is viewed, insert a record into a table which is like:


  ItemId | TimeStamp


Then, each night (or whenever your site is least utilised), have a process that counts the occurences of ItemId and builds a value for a table such as you have in Option 1.

Doing it this way will be much more efficient, as an insert is ridiculously cheap compared to trying to update on a table that has 36,500,000 rows and avoids issues with locking.

I'd also strongly suggest you hold this data not on your main database, so you can query it as you like without a performace hit; and consider splitting the tables into weekly or monthly reports to cut down on the amount of data that needs to be scrolled through.