If you work in oil & gas IT, you already know that data is everything. Every day, your company generates massive volumes of operational records—from drilling logs and maintenance reports to safety inspections, production data, and compliance documents.
But getting that data where it needs to be is a constant struggle. While SharePoint is often the default document management system, it was never designed to handle large-scale data integration, real-time reporting, or SQL-based analytics.
Instead of easily accessing the data, you find yourself:
📌 Dealing with slow, throttled queries every time you try to pull reports.
📌 Building workarounds with Power Automate or PowerShell, which constantly break as SharePoint data volumes grow.
📌 Waiting for Power BI dashboards to refresh, only to see them fail because SharePoint can’t process large lists efficiently.
📌 Manually extracting data from multiple SharePoint sites—since each drilling site, refinery, or compliance team has its own separate system.
📌 Struggling to integrate SharePoint with ERP, maintenance, and operational tracking systems, which rely on SQL, not SharePoint’s API.
Sound familiar?
The reality is SharePoint wasn’t built for real-time analytics, data-heavy workflows, or seamless SQL integration. And yet, you’re expected to deliver fast, reliable, and scalable data solutions for your engineering and analyst colleagues.
The good news?
You don’t need to waste time on manual workarounds anymore. Instead of spending hours troubleshooting API limits, throttling issues, and slow queries, you can automate SharePoint-to-SQL integration in minutes—with zero code required.
But before we talk about how, let’s break down why SharePoint creates so many data challenges for you—and why fixing them is critical to improving your operations, compliance, and efficiency.
The Biggest SharePoint Data Challenges in Oil & Gas IT
1️ You Can’t Query Large SharePoint Lists Efficiently
The oil and gas industry generates huge volumes of structured and unstructured data—from asset maintenance logs to regulatory reports. But SharePoint wasn’t built for querying large datasets, making reporting slow and inefficient.
🔻 The Problem:
SharePoint throttles large queries, forcing you to work around API limits.
Power BI and SQL Server struggle with SharePoint’s inefficient data structure.
Compliance teams need instant access to audit logs, but SharePoint’s search is painfully slow.
✅ The Fix: AxioWorks SQList automatically converts SharePoint lists into fully indexed SQL tables—so you can run fast SQL queries instead of fighting SharePoint’s limits.
2️ Your Data is Scattered Across Multiple SharePoint Sites
Your company isn’t using one SharePoint site—it’s using dozens. Each drilling site, refinery, and compliance department has its own SharePoint sub-site, making it impossible to unify data efficiently.
🔻 The Problem:
Compliance teams can’t access data across multiple SharePoint sites in real time.
Engineers and analysts waste hours searching for scattered reports.
As a developer, you have to build complex extraction pipelines just to merge SharePoint data.
✅ The Fix: SQList automatically consolidates SharePoint data from multiple sites into a centralised SQL database, so you have one reliable source of truth for operational data.
3️ SharePoint Doesn’t Integrate Well with Enterprise Systems
Oil and gas IT stacks are a notorious mix of legacy and modern enterprise applications—ERP, maintenance tracking, SCADA systems, and compliance platforms. But SharePoint wasn’t built to integrate with these systems.
🔻 The Problem:
As a developer, you’re spending hours manually exporting data for integration.
Power Automate breaks at scale when processing high volumes of SharePoint data.
SharePoint lacks real-time sync, leading to outdated operational reports.
✅ The Fix: SQList automates SharePoint-to-SQL synchronisation, making SharePoint data instantly available for ERP, compliance, and operational tracking systems.
4️ Power BI Dashboards Are Painfully Slow
Power BI is a must-have for analysts, but when connected to SharePoint, it crawls to a halt—especially with thousands of records spread across multiple sites.
🔻 The Problem:
Power BI refresh times are painfully slow when querying re-importing SharePoint data directly.
SharePoint’s API limits large dataset extraction, impacting dashboard performance.
Decision-makers don’t get real-time operational insights because the data is outdated.
✅ The Fix: As Power BI cannot query SharePoint directly, it has to import all the data and then query it. SQList has been designed to move SharePoint data into SQL Server, allowing Power BI to run at full speed—no more slow refreshes, no more missing data.
5️ Security & Compliance Risks with Manual Data Extraction
In the oil and gas sector, compliance isn’t optional. Regulations, audits, and security policies require full control over data access. But manual SharePoint data exports introduce security risks.
🔻 The Problem:
Manually exporting data creates compliance vulnerabilities.
External third-party tools can expose sensitive data to security risks.
IT teams need an on-premise, audit-friendly solution that follows corporate security policies.
✅ The Fix: SQList runs 100% inside your environment, ensuring secure, fully compliant data extraction while respecting SharePoint security permissions and audit trails.
How SQList Works (It’s Simpler Than You Think)
🚀 Step 1: Install SQList (takes minutes—no coding required).
🔗 Step 2: Connect it to your SharePoint lists and libraries.
📊 Step 3: Watch as it automatically syncs your SharePoint data into SQL Server—in near real time.
No scripts. No API limits. No manual exports. Just SQL-ready data, instantly.
“SQList saved us weeks of development time. No more broken scripts, no more slow Power BI reports—just real-time SQL data.”
Case Study: How an Oil & Gas Firm Solved Its SharePoint-to-SQL Challenge
A major oil & gas company was struggling to manage drilling site documentation across multiple SharePoint sites. Its IT team was wasting hours trying to:
⚠ Manually extract data from multiple SharePoint locations.
⚠ Fix broken Power Automate workflows and outdated PowerShell scripts.
⚠ Speed up Power BI reports that were running painfully slow.
✅ The Solution: They installed AxioWorks SQList to automate the entire process.
The Results:
✔ All SharePoint lists & libraries synced automatically into SQL Server.
✔ Power BI dashboards loaded instantly—no more slow SharePoint queries.
✔ Regulatory compliance improved with real-time, audit-ready data access.
Outcome: Its IT team saved countless hours and eliminated manual data processing—without writing a single line of code.
Ready to Stop Fighting SharePoint-to-SQL Issues? Try SQList for Free.
Wasting too much time on broken queries, slow reports, and manual data exports? Why not fix it today?👉 Get your free 30-day trial of SQList and start syncing SharePoint-to-SQL in minutes.
No scripts. No maintenance. Just real-time SQL data.
Join other oil & gas IT teams who have already eliminated SharePoint bottlenecks with SQList!
