Great question.

Trying to get exact accuracy from REAL/FLOAT and relying on DATETIME for exact time (.997ms), all have to be careful with!

I always first try the TRUNCATEONLY option when shrinking a file for the reason given above, I don't want the disk churn and fragmentation of the full shrink if at...

Another vote for Ola Hallengren's amazing scripts for index maintenance among other things.

I generally run it with best-practice settings + force statistics as often as I can, daily if possible...