R, PostgresSQL and poor performance

Thanks for the reply and suggestions. I've tried the RpgSQL drivers and
the results are pretty similar in terms of performance.

The ~1.5M records I'm trying to read into R are being extracted from a
table with ~300M rows (and ~60 columns) that has been indexed on the
relevant columns and horizontally partitioned (with constraint checking
on). I do need to try and optimize the database a bit more but I don?t
think this is the cause of the performance issues.