You can do it with Access if the jet database is on a shared network drive. SQL Server will be more robust, though and I would recommend using that. You setup the SQL Server database in the same way you setup the Access database. TestStand comes with some queries that you run that create the tables that match the default schema in TestStand.
We don't save the files on each tester. Instead, we save the results to a local file server and the file server does the transfer to the database. Saving locally would work in a similar fashion. The results are saved as XML files which SQL Server can import. The actual program that does the transfer is a service that runs on the server (or locally). Unfortunately, this program was written by my IS group and I don't have the source code. I do know it was written with VB.Net and only took them a couple of days to write and debug. The service is configurable to transfer files at any time or at any interval you choose. On the testers we have locally, it is set to look for new files every 30 seconds. As added security, the files are transferred using secure socket layer.
The process works very well. The exact same setup is running on the testers that are deployed overseas. They write to the same database here and we can usually view test results in near real-time.
I could try to find more details on the service program but I doubt I could post the source code as it would be considered proprietary.
Hope this helps.
