Help: How to select a subset at a time?

[Yingyao Zhou]

Let me simplify my question by using an example.
I have a long table (let's say one million rows) with only one column:
  name varchar(50)
I need to write a web interface to display one hundred entries at a
time.
  select * from name order by name;
then display one hundred subset is too expensive. Since there can be more
than one user accessing the web simultaneously, storing the selection in a
temp file or temp table does not solve the problem.

Any suggestion is appreciated.

Yingyao