Today's most popular

[eluser]gullah[/eluser]
I'm looking to have a feature on my site with the functionality of Today's most popular X.

Maybe I'm just being uncreative but the only way I can see doing this is to have a db field and increment it on views or actions and then have a cron/stored procedure reset that field at midnight or some other arbitrary time.

Is the database going to be able to quickly handle a large stored procedure that resets everything to zero without interrupting operations? Is there a better way?