src_postgres
is a function for creating a connection to a PostgreSQL database from the dplyr package. The RPostgreSQL package implements a method for the generic dbConnect
from the DBI package. src_postgres
calls dbConnect
from RPostgreSQL (I assume).
The generic connection object returned by dbConnect
is meant to be an open ended interface for sending SQL queries to the data base. This means you could feed it any select
, update
, insert
, delete
, etc. query that you like.
src_postgres
is part of the higher level interface to working with data from databases that Hadley built in dplyr. The src_*
functions connect to a db and then the tbl
functions specify a more specific data source (table, view, arbitrary select query) to pull data from. There are some basic table manipulation functions in dplyr but I don't believe it is intended to be a tool for doing update
or insert
type things in the db. That's just not what that tool is for. Note that the "verbs" implemented in dplyr are all focused on pulling data out and summarising (select
, filter
, mutate
, etc.).
If you need to alter data in a data base on a row level, you'll need to send SQL queries to a connection created by dbConnect
. If all you're doing is pulling data from a db and analyzing it in R, that is what dplyr is for.