We have very little visibility into what's going on "behind the scenes" so it can be really frustrating. But there are some things you can do... I'd start by looking at things like subqueries, and any joins that you're doing. For subqueries, see if you can avoid them somehow. For the joins, see if you can you get a sense of whether or not they're based on columns that are indexed. You might want to gradually remove things to determine what is causing the query to run slow.