How to Create Dynamically Generated WP Page?

How would one setup a WordPress page that has the ability to produce filtered results? For example: I have a list of projects that I want to post on my WordPress blog. The list is very extensive… I want to setup a search filter to narrow down a project of interest. So I may have a couple of fields such as topic, start date, end date, client, etc. to filter this data. The resulting page would be dynamically generated based on the filter/search criteria. This can be done if you go out and code it yourself and setup a database…. so how would you replicate this in WordPress? I know WordPress is not a traditional CMS… perhaps I am asking too much. Would be nice if I can do this without writing the PHP code and referencing another database. If I do that… the built-in WordPress search is no longer going to be able to do a full-text search of the site. Suggestions?