Yes, you can use dplyr to connect and query data from a database. https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/dplyr/vignettes/data...

Yes and no - the dplyr example code heavily used pipes but that's really a feature of Magrittr package. You can used dplyr without pipes.

Plus dplyr essentially allows you to treat tables in a database as if they are data.frames.