In this article.. learn how to maintain your SharePoint database (best practices).

Once you have won all your SharePoint battles, its no time for relaxing.. its time for your next task!
Have you wondered what are some of the ways you could ‘make’ SharePoint go faster? Are you confident to say that your SharePoint databases are at an optimum? The database administrators I have worked with stay far away from SharePoint databases. This time, I got on to the task myself..

Some of the ways you can optimize your database are:
Defragmentation of the SharePoint database
Defragmenting indexes – This is more beneficial to do indexes rather than tables for database performance.
Shrink Database and log files

As a SharePoint Admin, you need to learn to measure the fragmentation in a SharePoint Database.

You will need to create maintenance plans for SharePoint database. Some maintenance plan best practices are:

• Check database integrity
• Shrink DatabaseReorganize Index
• Rebuild Index
• Maintenance Cleanup task

For step by step instructions, download them here (docx file from Microsoft):
http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=111531&clcid=0×409