I don't know either. In VBA, such a comparison does get all parameters evaluated before the comparison is performed. In the Access Jet engine, it does not - a SWITCH function, for instance, stops evaluating when the first true condition is reached, so you can put in computations that yield a Null or unknown value, if something else stops the eval first, which is not possible in VBA.

But the SQL Server optimizer is so smart about avoiding unnecessary work, it seems to me that in a situation when an already known value of a local variable can -completely- obviate the need to examine table data, it would most certainly do so. Maybe examining a few query plans would tell the story, but I'm still not very good at reading those, despite many hours spent over tutorials on the subject.