[R] proper way to process dataframe by rows

[Jack Tanner]

This is a best practices / style question.

The way I use RODBC is I something like this:

 > foo <- sqlQuery(db, "select * from foo")
 > apply(foo, 1, function{...})

That is, I use apply to iterate over each result -- row -- in the 
RODBC-produced dataframe. Is this how one generally wants to do this?

My concern is that when apply iterates over the rows, it uses 
as.matrix() to convert the dataframe to a character representation of 
itself. Thus my database's carefully planned data types (that RODBC 
carefully preserved when returning query results) get completely lost as 
I process the data. I've taken to judiciously sprinkling as.numeric() 
and friends here and there, but this is just begging for bugs.

In other words, what is the smart way to process a dataframe by rows? Or 
is there, by chance, a specific technique or practice that is available 
for RODBC results but not for dataframes in general?

Thank you for your thoughts.