Connecting in R with dbConnect and odbc fails, but connecting with RODBC works fine. Why?

Question

I am trying to connect to an EXASol database through odbc using R. After setting up the DSN, I can connect to the database using the RODBC package.

odbc_channel <- odbcConnect("exa", uid = "username",
                        pwd = "password")

This works fine. However, when I try to use dbConnect, the same DSN fails.

con <- dbConnect(odbc(), 
             dsn = "exa", 
             uid = "username",
             pwd = "password")

The code begins running and never stops. Any idea what is happening? The DSN seems to be set up correctly since it works with RODBC.