SQL Database Management for SharePoint Insight

I hope you have checked out the database maintenance whitepaper that Bill Baer put together and just released on TechNet.  In the review cycle for the paper, I saw some very insightful guidance from Mike Watson, Tom Tseng, and incredible insight from Ronnie Thompson.  Ronnie one of the Sr. Ops folks who was recently promoted to Ops Manager.  (A super strong SQL SME and good person to know :))  He is someone who comes from a SQL background and has learned SharePoint coming from that side of supporting the more than 17 TB in MSIT.  Here's a few snippets from the email:

• Your clustered Index IS your table – rebuild / reorganize your clustered index is what defrags the table. You cannot defrag a table with rebuilding / reorganizing your clustered.
• There is no defrag option. ‘reindex’ is defrag – they are synonymous.
• We should never – absolutely never – recommend setting up a DB maintenance plan to autoshrink DBs. Shrink DB or Shrink files is one of the most resource intensive operations within SQL and the bigger the DB the bigger the perf hit.
• Good places to shrink is when you have explicitly moved site collection out (say for instance using merge db etc.) and you know the db is become smaller.  If this is a small change like cleaning recycle bin etc., customers should not look for this small reduction. 
• Maintenance operations can be long running and can have a significant impact on perf.
• Personally – I would never recommend shrinking a DB unless disk space is an issue and / or your DB has lost at least 50% of its content.