Query Folding Tips for Salesforce.com objects

[cmathistx]

Does anyone have any query folding tips when querying Salesforce.com objects?  For examples, when using date filtering (i.e. last 90 days etc) my queries take much longer to run than when I just remove any date filtering at all.  Seems odd that that would be the case.

I've got a workbook that runs eight queries against three Salesforce objects and pulls data on a specific sales rep.  In total, I'm only pulling about 5,000 records.  When refreshing the data, it takes about 2-4 minutes to load 5,000 records.  That seems awfully slow to me with such little data being pulled.

Any information or help you could provide would be very much appreciated.

Chris

[cmathistx]

It appears that removing null records from Salesforce fields used for date filtering improves query performance significantly.