So here is my situation: I have a vendor supplied DB we cannot modify and a custom db that imports data from the vendor app and acts on it. Once records are imported form the vendor app, they cannot appear on the list of records to be imported. Also we only want to display the 250 most recent records that have not been imported.

What I originally started with was select the list of ids that have been imported from the custom db, and then query the vendor db, using the list of ids in a .Where(x => !idList.Contains(x.Id)) clause on the remote query.

This worked up until we broke 2100 records imported into the custom db, as 2100 is the limit on the number of parameters that can be passed into SQL. After finding out this was the actual problem and not the 'invalid buffer'/'severe error' ADO.Net reported, my solution was to remove the first 2000 ids in the remote query, and then remove the remaining records in the local query.

Having to pull back a large number of irrelevant records, just to exclude them, so I can get the correct 250 records seems very inelegant. Is there a better way to do this, short of doing a cross db stored procedure?

Thanks in advance.