One of the most interesting characteristics of dplyr is that it is possible, with dbplyr, to work with an external table stored in a database as if it were an R DataFrame. In other words, by defining a connection to a database, the same dplyr code that was developed on a DataFrame can be applied to an external table.
Further information on dbplyr can be found on CRAN at: https://cran.rproject.org/web/packages/dbplyr/vignettes/dbplyr.html