Not sure what I'm looking for???

[Lyle Hopkins]

Hi All,
I'm a bit stumped. I know what I want to do, I'm pretty sure it's possible, but I'm not sure what it's called so I can't find any good info on how to do it.

I have a table with over a million rows.
About every 10 seconds I want to make about 100 lookups to this table.
Each lookup if different but I know that they they all will only involve certain rows.
So I want to first select these rows, then make the 100 lookups against only these rows.

What is this called? Do I need to create a temp table on the disk, or can I just load the rows into memory then query them?

Please give me some direction as to what's possible and what my options are.

The software primarily uses MySQL but later gets ported to other DBs, so a more standard way of doing this is preferred.

Thank you.


Lyle