I recently had a customer need about understanding how the social ratings where actually working.

First thing to have in mind, when a user click on a social rating to rate a document, the database that is used is User Profile Service Application_SocialDB_xxxx and the table that is used to store this information is named [SocialRatings].

On my environment, if I run the following request:

SELECT TOP 1000 [UrlID]
      ,[User_RecordID]
      ,[Rating]
      ,[Title]
      ,[LastModifiedTime]
      ,[PartitionID]
  FROM [User Profile Service Application_SocialDB_2c9969f5639946ddbb5b1fae021ebca2].[dbo].[SocialRatings]

I get the following results:

UrlID    User_RecordID    Rating    Title    LastModifiedTime
16    1    60    Mon Premier Document Set    2010-03-11 20:09:06.390
22    1    20    test    2010-03-15 19:39:59.200
24    1    100    toto    2010-03-15 19:44:14.657
24    2    80    toto    2010-03-15 19:46:10.220

So it means that all the ratings are stored in this database.

Then, they are propagated to the content databases with the User Profile Service Application – Social Rating Synchronization Job job definition that by default runs every minute.