Altering $num_views field of database records

[Carl Maltby]

I'm started to normalise our database into several more appropriate ones now we're on 4.x; we've run for too many years on one database only and certainly one size does not fit all.

The problem I've got is that the view counts of existing published articles are being reset when manually rewriting them in a new database. Is there a simple way of manually altering the view count of a record? I understand that it is $num_view however I can't immediately see any facility to alter this value. The only other option would be to add a new field to the database for "additional views" and manually adding this to everywhere that uses $num_views; very clumsy and backwards.

[Carl Maltby]

No ideas on this? I'm surprised that this is not a unique issue....