Since quite some time, we use Apache Solr in one of our project for indexing data to search it faster from Solr server instead of always searching it from main database and creating bottleneck. We use Sunspot gem which is ruby library for rails application to implement Apache solr. Recently we thought to implement Apache SolrCloud architecture in same application to manage our daily growing Solr data more efficiently with this powerful feature of Apache Solr. In brief, you can consider it as a another database where your data is indexed and stored as xml documents. You can query this