Having a distributed SolrCloud cluster is very useful; you can have multiple shards and replicas, which are automatically handled by Solr itself. This means that your data will be automatically distributed among shards and replicated between replicas. However, if you have your data spread among multiple shards, you probably want them to be queried while you send the query. With earlier versions of Solr before 4.0, you had to manually specify the list of shards that should be queried. Now you don't need to do that, and this recipe will show you how to make your queries distributed.
If you are not familiar with setting up the SolrCloud cluster, please refer to the Creating a new SolrCloud cluster recipe in this chapter. If you are not familiar with how to modify the returned documents using the fl parameter, please read the Modifying returned documents recipe in Chapter 4, Querying Solr.