Admittedly, I have been one of the late comers to the Drush revolution. I've heard since it was released how amazing it was, and it's taken me forever to get around to playing with it on my localhost environment to see how it can best be utilized for my own workflow during development. I've been greatly satisfied on how easy it is to update modules, download, install & uninstall modules, and have been trying to dig into the MySQL usage as well, however ran into some issues with my current setup.

The Problem

I'm using XAMPP for linux, on my Ubuntu machine to develop locally, which alone has sped up my development considerably, and makes my life much easier. However, when it comes to MySQL, it is an issue as the setup that is created by XAMPP is not a traditional setup of Apache, MySQL, PHP that you would get by setting it up yourself in a more traditional way. Everything is operated out of the directory at /opt/lampp/ and some traditional commands that are available on my system from the command line like mysql, and mysqldump do not understand that other installation I have in the XAMPP setup. 

So when I was running commands using Drush like: $drush sql dump I was getting an error like the following:
mysqldump: Got error: 2002: Can't connect to local MySQL server through socket '/var/run/mysqld/mysqld.sock' (2) when trying to connect

Okay, that's a pain in my ass. So I decided with my VERY minimal knowledge of Drush and the underlying code back there that it must be possible for me to set up something that could make that work properly.