I sometimes have to compare character data with particular German collation support where umlauts like 'ä' are treated equally to their "expanded form" 'ae'. That can be done since SA 10.0.1 with collation tailoring, in particular with the SortType phonebook:

SELECT
   COMPARE( N'Schaefer-Maassen',N'Schäfer-Maaßen'),
   COMPARE( N'Schaefer-Maassen',N'Schäfer-Maaßen',
     'UCA(locale=de-de;accent=ignore;SortType=standard)'),
   COMPARE( N'Schaefer-Maassen',N'Schäfer-Maaßen',
     'UCA(locale=de-de;accent=ignore;SortType=phonebook)');
-- return -1, -1, 0

While this does work, it requires the usage of the compare() function. I have lately seen that MS SQL 2000ff. has a somewhat "smoother" syntax by allowing a "COLLATE clause", both when defining table columns and when doing comparions. So I could just write

SELECT * FROM sys.dummy
    WHERE N'Schaefer-Maassen' = N'Schäfer-Maaßen' COLLATE German_PhoneBook_CI_AI

I don't know whether a COLLATE clause is standard SQL (just because the MS SQL 2000 docs are very silent w.r.t to Standard SQL compliance). The difference between both syntax constructs seems quite small, however, with longer statements the MS SQL syntax seems less verbose. And it's easier to turn a "standard comparison" into a collation-based when one just has to append a COLLATE clause.

So my question is:

Can a collation-based comparison without the COMPARE function() be done within SA, too?

(I'm not refering to changing the default database collation, it's only for particular cases.)