Displaying Posts Using a Custom Select Query

I have a site that I'm building that will have a custom page template that will have roughly 5 custom fields that will each have a table associated with them and the values chosen for all 5 fields will be searchable by the user via pull down menus - not tags or any kind of "text" search. It seems that in order to do this, I need to use a custom select query. I found the following post that provides some good info:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Displayin...m_Select_Query

Has anyone had any experience with this type of thing? Essentially the posts are all data elements that have variations with regard to the combination of those 5 custom fields and the users\visitors of the site will each be interested in displaying unique, discrete combinations of this field set.

This isn't a real estate site - I can get into the purpose if that helps. I have seen some real estate sites that use various wordpress themes that have (I think) something similar - searching by neighborhood, price range (from "pull down" menus) - but I suspect that these are standard plugins created by various developers.

I'm pretty good with Atahualpa and have some other sites with it (just recently discovered this forum - was very to happy to find it!) This is a project that is very important to me and I'd love to be able to get it rolling so any help would be appreciated!

Thanks
Thomas