What is the easiest way to find the total number of items in PDMLink?

It's a completely different thing to find how many:

- unique documents, etc. (e.g. CAD, non-CAD)

- document versions (CAD, non-CAD)

- vaulted files

From your note, seems like you may be interested in the third one.  If so, a simple database query of "FVITEM" will return what you need.  Note: If you Windchill publishing in place, publishing creates many files in general for each CAD Document version.

select count(*) from FTITEM.

If this is not it, there are easy ways to get the needed info - just have to clarify what the need is.

If it's just the total number of files, looking at the vault folders in the OS (e.g. Windows) could easily return the value(s) of interest.

Just to piggyback off what Mike said, there are many, many files in the file vault beyond just documents and CAD documents.  With publishing we end up with about a 10:1 ratio, meaning for every version of a CAD document we have 9 other files in the file vault.

See this post for several different queries you can run to get total number of CAD documents:

https://community.ptc.com/t5/Windchill-Questions/How-to-determine-the-number-of-unique-part-numbers-site-wide-in/m-p/292287/highlight/true#M34308