- The precedence rules for the :meth:`.ColumnOperators.collate` operator

- The precedence rules for the :meth:`.ColumnOperators.collate` operator
have been modified, such that the COLLATE operator is now of lower
precedence than the comparison operators.  This has the effect that
a COLLATE applied to a comparison will not render parenthesis
around the comparison, which is not parsed by backends such as
MSSQL.  The change is backwards incompatible for those setups that
were working around the issue by applying :meth:`.Operators.collate`
to an individual element of the comparison expression,
rather than the comparison expression as a whole. [ticket:2879]