When disconnected from a DB, I used to be able to work on code just fine. New in v9, it seems to always be looking for metadata in the unavailable data dictionary. It does this about every 20 seconds or so, usually after typing a new table name, column name or alias. It will spin for about 5 to 10 seconds, and then return control to my keyboard. If it did this in previous versions, it was fast enough that I never noticed.
So in v9 offline coding has now become impossible for me. I'm sure there is a setting to keep it from trying to do what it's doing, but I'd rather see the next patch release of PSD corrected so that it only attempts these lookups when connected.