title: RODBC Query Tuning
body: <p>I am trying to pull data from our Oracle datamart into R using RODBC. I have been able to work through some of my issues, but I have one basic question.</p>
  
  <p>How can I retain the formatting as it sits in the database?</p>
  
  <p>Using the following command</p>
  
  <pre><code>uapp &lt;- sqlQuery(ch, SQL, stringsAsFactors=F)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>My data are retrieved as expected, but some fields are converted to numeric and logical once in R when they should be characters.  I can get around this if I use:</p>
  
  <pre><code>uapp &lt;- sqlQuery(ch, SQL, stringsAsFactors=F, as.is=T)
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But I "lose" columns being formatted as dates when I would like them to be.</p>