Capturing Page Views Data

Hi,

We are current users of Piwik and were looking into the discrepancies within the database versus what we see the Piwik front end reporting and was hoping for your help to understand the difference.

How does Piwik capture the number of Page Views versus unique Page Views?

In the database we see a field labeled idaction_url which we are taking the sum of. However, it seems to provide a figure 3 times what Piwik seems to be reporting for Page Views so I have a feeling it is reporting the total number of actions happening on the page. Is there a way to filter this to capture just page views?

Any help would be much appreciated!

Best regards,
Kim