title: Using Solr search index as a database - is this "wrong"?
body: <p>My team is working with a third party CMS that uses Solr as a search index.  I've noticed that it seems like the authors are using Solr as a database of sorts in that each document returned contains two fields:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>The Solr document ID (basically a classname and database id)</li>
  <li>An XML representation of the entire object</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>So basically it runs a search against Solr, download the XML representation of the object, and then instantiate the object from the XML rather than looking it up in the database using the id.</p>
  
  <p>My gut feeling tells me this is a bad practice.  Solr is a search index, not a database... so it makes more sense to me to execute our complex searches against Solr, get the document ids, and then pull the corresponding rows out of the database.</p>
  
  <p>Is the current implementation perfectly sound, or is there data to support the idea that this is ripe for refactoring?</p>
  
  <p><strong>EDIT:</strong> When I say "XML representation" - I mean one stored field that contains an XML string of all of the object's properties, not multiple stored fields.</p>