I'd like to add:
Favoring "Elegant" code over highly performing code. The code that works best against databases is often ugly to the application developer's eye.
Believing that nonsense about premature optimization. Databases must consider performance in the original design and in any subsequent development. Performance is 50% of database design (40% is data integrity and the last 10% is security) in my opinion. Databases which are not built from the bottom up to perform will perform badly once real users and real traffic are placed against the database. Premature optimization doesn't mean no optimization! It doesn't mean you should write code that will almost always perform badly because you find it easier (cursors for example which should never be allowed in a production database unless all else has failed). It means you don't need to look at squeezing out that last little bit of performance until you need to. A lot is known about what will perform better on databases, to ignore this in design and development is short-sighted at best.
