Is there a way to run tables in RAM?

I would like to know if there is anyway to move a section of some tables
into RAM to work on them.

I have large table, about 700MB or so and growing. I also have a bizarre
collection of queries that run hundreds of queries on a small section of
this table. These queries only look at about 100 or so records at a time
and they run hundreds of queries on the data looking for patterns. This
causes the program to run very slowly because of hard drive access time.
Some times it needs to write changes back to the records it is working
with.

Is there anyway that I can move a few hundred records of the table into
RAM and work on it there, it would be much faster.

Is there anyway to create a temporary table that will only exist in RAM
and not be written to the hard drive? Or do temporary tables already do
that?

If I can use a temporary table this way is there any simple way to merge
the changes back into the original table?

Royce Souther
www.SiliconTao.com
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