This has been said before, but: indexes, indexes, indexes. I've seen so many cases of poorly performing enterprise web apps that were fixed by simply doing a little profiling (to see which tables were being hit a lot), and then adding an index on those tables. This doesn't even require much in the way of SQL writing knowledge, and the payoff is huge.
Avoid data duplication like the plague. Some people advocate that a little duplication won't hurt, and will improve performance. Hey, I'm not saying that you have to torture your schema into Third Normal Form, until it's so abstract that not even the DBA's know what's going on. Just understand that whenever you duplicate a set of names, or zipcodes, or shipping codes, the copies WILL fall out of synch with each other eventually. It WILL happen. And then you'll be kicking yourself as you run the weekly maintenance script.
And lastly: use a clear, consistent, intuitive naming convention. In the same way that a well written piece of code should be readable, a good SQL schema or query should be readable and practically tell you what it's doing, even without comments. You'll thank yourself in six months, when you have to to maintenance on the tables. "SELECT account_number, billing_date FROM national_accounts" is infinitely easier to work with than "SELECT ACCNTNBR, BILLDAT FROM NTNLACCTS".
