[R] SQL Database

[Doran, Harold]

I'm doing some work now to learn which SQL database package is the most optimal for the task I am working on. There are many packages, and I'm reviewing the documentation on some of them now. I am seeking advice from those of you who might suggest a package to use for the task I am currently working with.

The work is currently as follows. My users currently use another tool to extract tables from a server, save those tables as .csv files, and then those csv files are read into R and stuff is done on the data in those files. This adds overhead that can be bypassed if users instead can directly access the database from within R and grab the tables they need and then those tables are data frames in the R session and available to do stuff.

The sequence of work (I think) I just this:

Step 1: Connect to the remote server (connection string and authenticate the user)
Step 2: Have a SQL query statement that grabs the tables from the remote server 
Step 3: Close the connection

The two packages I have narrowed my studies to are Dbplyr and RODBC, both of which seem to be similar. 

Any experiences out there to suggest these two packages are in fact right for this task, or would there be other packages that might be more optimal for this?

Thanks,
Harold