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Why is as.Date slow on a character vector?

I have a large data.frame (roughly 60 mil observations) that I read from a database using RMySQL. The dates are brought in as characters (there doesn't seem to be a way to change this) and so I use as.Date to convert things to date. However, this takes an extremely long time witih so many observations. Is there anything one can do to make this faster?

r date character posix
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