Load only certain attributes and map them, by collection

Question

So I am using this code:

$connection = Mage::getSingleton('core/resource')->getConnection('core_read');
$IDs = implode(',', $products);
$sql = 'SELECT * FROM `catalog_category_product` WHERE product_id IN ('.$IDs.')';
$results = $connection->fetchAll($sql);
foreach ($results as $result) {
  $this->_backupPositionData[$result['product_id'].'-'.$result['category_id']] = $result['position'];
}

to acquire from the DB the rows with relevant information and loop through them to map them, etc.

But, as we all know, using direct SQL is not the most beautiful thing. So I wanted to know whether it's possible to use loading of collection somehow to perform the same operation (until the foreach).

The problem here is that I might have to make this fetching for thousands of products, and SQL is the fastest in performance in that case. Is it possible somehow with collection or other object loading technique to do the same ?

UPDATE:

I have the IDs of the products (the database saved IDs). What I need is to acquire and map the category id and position to each product id.

In few words - I need the final result array to look like that:

array["product_id-category_id"]["position"]

P.S. I am overwriting the _saveProductCategories() function from Mage_ImportExport_Model_Import_Entity_Product and in line 1069 instead of 'position' => 1 I pass certain element of my array. :)