Does SQL Server short-circuit IF statements?

Question

I am working on optimizing some heavily used stored procedures and ran across a scenario that raised a question that I couldn't find any answers for: when evaluating TSQL in a stored procedure, does SQL Server short-circuit the IF statement?

For example, assume a stored procedure has code similar to:

IF @condition1 = 1
OR EXISTS(SELECT 1 FROM table1 WHERE column1 = @value1)
...

In this scenario does SQL Server short-circuit the evaluation such that the EXISTS statement is never executed when the preceding clause evaluates to true?

If it never or only sometimes does, then we have some rewriting ahead of us.

Answer 1

Even if it appears to work, it should not be relied upon. The CASE statement is the only thing that the documentation states as being short-circuiting, but even that isn't (or at least wasn't) always the case (hee hee). Here is one bug that was fortunately fixed as of SQL Server 2012 (see the comments).

In addition to the rabbit hole (an interesting one, for sure) of links in comments from the comment posted by @Martin on the question, you should also check out this article:

Understanding T-SQL Expression Short-Circuiting

and the discussion forum related to that article.