Short circuit in JOIN
DB&lt;>fiddle and other online-services allow you to test different DBMS without having to install them locally. As shown in: 

https://dbfiddle.uk/?rdbms=sqlserver_2017&amp;fiddle=7692d5abba854bdc57d90c95335014c0

There is no access to table B. 

You may find the following article by Lukas Eder of interest, he compares algebraic optimizations for different DBMS:

https://blog.jooq.org/2017/09/28/10-cool-sql-optimisations-that-do-not-depend-on-the-cost-model/