I am having a table called location_address where i have a column named country with type varchar2.

I have millions of rows in that.The immediate need is we should take all the rows where the country value is between 'A' and 'Z'.We tried with some query but its taking too much time to return the records.

Our query is

select distinct country from location_address where
substr(country,1,1) between 'A' and 'Z' and
substr(country,2,1) between 'A' and 'Z';

Can anyone reply me with a fastest script for this need.

thanks