Summary

The Salesforce platform is a robust environment in which native and custom applications can scale to large volumes of data very quickly while continuing to perform well.

You can maximize the benefits of these capabilities by:

Making queries selective—ensure that reports, list views, and SOQL are using appropriate filters.
Reducing the amount of active data—use archiving, mashups, and other techniques to reduce the amount of data stored in Salesforce.

Following these two broad principles and the best practices that support them can reduce the impact of large data volumes on Salesforce application performance.