Drupal developer Ben Buckman shared a script he wrote to create scripts for synchronizing a database between a remote and a local server. Commenters on his web site pointed out that Drush could do this, and do it even better.

Why is this an inspirational story of sharing? Well, first of all he learned something new! He also surely helped many other people learn something new. This author, for one, was trying to find out how to transfer databases from one installation of a site to another, drush or not, and drush sql-sync had seemed complicated and limiting. It was this blog post that was found, rather than direct drush documentation, and that – ultimately – taught the best way to do it, thanks to Ben Buckman having shared his approach which got other people to share theirs. He then figured it out and posted how to do his original goal with Drush.

drush @live_site @dev_site sql-sync

drush sql-sync SRC DEST --source-remote-host=XX --source-dump=YY --target-dump=ZZ

"I stand corrected! Thanks to the commenters for enlightening me, Drush does in fact do this."
http://benbuckman.net/tech/10/07/database-sync-script-ssh-and-drush