Wise Job Scheduling

Guys,

I've been asked to properly schedule some jobs on our system for a database following a full recovery model. I realized that the order for some of the jobs might matter and came up with the solution, which is described below.

Please let me know if this ordering makes sense and/or if you have any general comments/suggestions:

1. Backup all dbs [in case defragmentation messes something up]
2. Defragmentation [this will grow the transaction log]
3. Backup transaction log [backs up trans log and truncates inactive portion of it]
4. Shrink log file

Also, I've been previously suggested not to shrink the log file, unless absolutely necessary, as it is resource intensive. In my experience, however, this operation does not seem to be resource intensive at all. It took me 1 second to shrink the transaction log file from 25GB to 2GB.

Is it regrowing of the log file that will affect performance?

Also, if I do shrink the transaction log file, is there a suggested value to shrink it to - possibly a function of the database file size?


Thanks a lot