That was my understanding as well, but I'm having issues using pool with the odbc package using a MySQL driver. When I run the code below, I see the following error - these seems to indicate that the odbc package/drive is not fully DBI compliant. I am able to make a working odbc connection when I call dbConnect directly. I also saw this SO post with the same error for SQL Server.
# define a pool object
pool <- dbPool(
odbc::odbc(),
Driver = "MySQL Driver",
Database = "database-name",
Server = "server",
UID = "user",
PWD = "password",
Port = 3306
)
warning messages from top-level task callback '1'
Warning message:
Could not notify connection observer. trying to get slot "info" from an object (class "Pool") that is not an S4 object