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.
The capabilities of dbplyr have been extremely popular within enterprises where the tables may be too large to store on disk. The analytics department can access and analyse data stored in databases such as AWS Redshift, Oracle, and many others using standard R code (dplyr).
Further information on dbplyr can be found on CRAN at: https://cran.rproject.org/web/packages/dbplyr/vignettes/dbplyr.html.