Select and Insert in same statement?

[CroNiX]

I have a voter registration table that has 2.8 million entries.  It takes about 4 minutes to search for a name to see if it exists.  I was thinking to split the table into 26 separate tables for each letter of the alphabet to speed things up.

 

I haven't had to do anything like this before and I'm wondering if its possible to do this with a single query (or 26) instead of having php do it.

 

Something like:

SELECT * from maintable WHERE lastname LIKE 'A%'

and insert all the data into a new table (which would have the identical structure of maintable) table_a?

 

then do the same thing for b and c and so on.

 

Is this possible to do in a single query?  I'm guessing yes but have not as of yet been able to find a solution.

 

Thanks for any help.

[Barand]

INSERT INTO table_a
SELECT * FROM maintable WHERE lastname LIKE 'A%'

 

Before you do that, do you have an index on lastname?