Mike,

>Currently, the new database and logfiles autogrowth are set to the following
>Data File (Autogrowth = 1MB)

That is a ridiculously small growth setting for a databasee of that size. You are going to cause a lot of file level and database fragmenation plus an inordinate amount of time for SQL to keep allocating space to the MDF. Push it up to 100mb .

The overhead involved with varchar() compared to char() is such that we've made a decision to not varchar() any field that is char(10) or smaller.

How heavily inserted is your database? How heavily updated is it?

>The Logfile is automatically being shrunk everytime we do a backup. The bulk of it is in the datafile. We also noticed on all tables that the index size is far greater than the data size. One of our tables consist of 800MB on its data size and 1.8 GB on its index size. Even if we do a full reindexing on these tables, the ratio between the data and index size still remains. Is it a normal case that the index size is greater than the data size?

DBCC SHOWCONTIG can help you track down indexes that are growing excessively fast. In general here we create a clustered index on the PK for the table. If you have the clustered index on one of the other fields you can cause excessive page splits.

You may want to do a serious examination to see if the tables are over indexed. You can use the index tuning wizard to help you determine if you have the correct indexes in place.