r-dbi

With RODBC , there were functions like sqlUpdate(channel, dat, ...) that allowed you pass dat = data.frame(...) instead of having to construct your own SQL string. However, with R's DBI , all I see are functions like dbSendQuery(conn, statement, ...) which only take a string statement and gives no opportunity to specify a data.frame directly. So how to UPDATE using a data.frame with DBI? Really late, my answer, but maybe still helpful... There is no single function (I know) in the DBI/odbc package but you can replicate the update behavior using a prepared update statement (which should work

In perl/python DBI APIs have a mechanism to safely interpolate in parameters to an sql query. For example in python I would do: cursor.execute("SELECT * FROM table WHERE value > ?", (5,)) Where the second parameter to the execute method is a tuple of parameters to add into the sql query Is there a similar mechanism for R's DBI compliant APIs? The examples I've seen never show parameters passed to the query. If not, what is the safest way to interpolate in parameters to a query? I'm specifically looking at using RPostgresSQL. Just for completeness, I'll add an answer based on Hadley's comment.