I have the following code that takes forever to run. Can anyone suggest ways of speeding up the process?

select courseid,classid,studentid,birthdate,firstname,middlei,lastname,address,city,state,zip;
from student;
where empty(web_exp);
into table c:\tempweb

open database hunter
use vwhe_card
append from c:\tempweb

*!* want to do this later just in case the above didn't work
select student
set filter to empty(web_exp)
replace web_exp with date() all

I've also tried:
use student
set filter to empty(web_exp)

open database hunter
use vwhe_card
append from student

The database has over 390000 records. For test data, I'm looking for 42 records and it's taking so long. Should I set an index?

I would appreciate any help and thanks in advance!
Sunshine