SQL Server vs SOLR (Or any document db) I have my "customer" data in a normalized sql server database.

Getting out the customer data in my app is taking too long.  This is because I have to go to 10+ tables to get all the data I need.

My company has an installation of SOLR that I thought about storing a Json object that contains all the data I need for a single "customer" already put together.

I think that this would give me some significant speed improvements.

However, it got me to wondering what the difference would be to me putting this data in a single table with a varchar(max) column that has the Json in it.  I could index my 10ish searchable columns on the same table as the json.

I know that document databases are very popular.  So I imagine there has to be benefits over just rolling my own using denormalized data in sql server.  Can someone tell me what they are?
Many NoSQL products have sharding built-in.  The DBMS itself looks after storing a particular key range on a certain server and keeping redundant copies for high availability.  Client connections are routed within the DBMS rather than in the application.  Multi-server scale out becomes easy, at the cost of CAP compromises.