Partition on non key varchar column

[Jay Jarman]

I have a table with approx 5 million rows. One of the columns is fword which is the first word from another text column in the same table. The application I'm using does searches on the fword column. I have an index on this column but I thought in theory partitioning the table based on the alphabet on fword would speed my performance. For example, the application is looking for the word "foobar". If I had 27 partitions (1 for each letter and an extra for words that might start with a special character or a number) then in theory, it would search the partition that contains the "f" words. This column is not unique. There could be several rows with the value "foobar" for this column. Building a partition on the actual primary key doesn't make sense because it is just a number and the application doesn't search on this. I can't change the application and I can't change the column layout of the table.

Is it possible to create partitions based on a varchar column and where can I find the syntax on how to do such a thing?