querying user bookmarks from a large number of bookmarks

Question

I am trying to access the bookmarks created by a single user. The key is stored in the links table, attribute link_owner.

However, get_bookmarks() seems to load the entire table and all I am left with is to parse the table and filter the rows with a matching userid.

For my application I expect the number of links to be rather large (more than 10,000). Am I to old school to fear that this usage case will slow down things bigtime? What other ways are there to do this a bit more efficiently? WP_Query seems to apply only to posts. Or should I go and use SQL right away?