Alphabetic Pager Class

[Dani Castaños <dcastanos(at)androme(dot)es>]

Hello!

I'm trying to build an alphabetic pager class. For instance, an address 
book ordered by the Last Name where only results begining with A are 
shown, and A - B - C - D - ... links below to change the letter which 
i'm filtering for.
The point is I don't want to have enabled those links wich have no 
occurrences in them. So, I'm wondering which is the best way to do the 
query.

My first thought to know how many results are there for each, is to do 
something like:
SELECT COUNT(field) FROM table WHERE UPPER( field )  LIKE UPPER( 'A%' );
SELECT COUNT(field) FROM table WHERE UPPER( field )  LIKE UPPER( 'B%' );
SELECT COUNT(field) FROM table WHERE UPPER( field )  LIKE UPPER( 'C%' );
...
and so on. But obviously, it is not an effcient way to do this.
Is it possible to reduce this to only one query??

Thank you in advance.

Dani