Yes that's it. When I first wrote the demo code for this question I created a new database with an explicit collation, and ran the SELECT query without an explicit COLLATE clause. After some thought, I decided that this made the code a bit too long and made the question sneakier than I would like, so I went with the shorter version with the explicit COLLATE. Perhaps I made the wrong decision there; the dependency on default collation is a good learning point.