Skip to main content

Find out the Second (2nd) Highest Salary ...

For past 15 days I am actively participating in the discussion forums of dotnetspider. Yesterday there was a question relating to SQL Server which seems to be asked in interviews very often. i.e., How to find out the 2nd highest salary of an employee?

Thought I would give out an sample for those who are yet to find an answer for this. For that purpose I have given a table structure with few sample records inserted to it.

-- Table Structure
Create table employee
(
[Name] varchar(20),
Sal int
)
Go

-- Populate Sample Records
Insert into employee values ('Vadivel', 80000)
Insert into employee values ('Vel', 70000)
Insert into employee values ('xxx', 40000)
Insert into employee values ('Sneha', 60000)

The Solution:

Select top 1 [Name], Sal from
(
Select Top 2 [Name], Sal from employee order by Sal Desc
) AS A1 Order by Sal


Technorati tags: , , ,

Comments

Anonymous said…
why dont u try this:

SELECT MIN(Salary)
FROM Employees
WHERE EmpID IN
(
SELECT TOP 2 EmpID
FROM Employees
ORDER BY Salary Desc
)
Vadivel said…
Anonymous :) your query won't work for the schema which I have defined in this post. If you have noticed I don't have a "Surrogate" or "Natural" key in the table.

Though the othe alternative to my query is,

Select Min(Sal) From Employee Where Sal IN
(
Select Top 2 Sal From Employee Order by Sal Desc
)

More over i feel my query is better for displaying "Name" as well as "Sal" column together without much complexity.

If we need to display "name" too in ur query it won't work directly ..unless or until u introduce a "Group By" clause somewhere!
Unknown said…
Many more methods

http://sqlblogcasts.com/blogs/madhivanan/archive/2007/11/26/find-nth-maximum-value.aspx
Anonymous said…
select top 1 salary from emp where (salary<(select max(salary) from emp ))ORDER BY salary DESC
Unknown said…
select min(salary) from h_salary where salary in(select top 2 salary from h_salary order by salary desc )
Matt Campbell said…
Amendment:

This also good for getting 2nd-highest value:

SELECT MAX(col_name) FROM table_name WHERE col_name < MAX(col_name)

Want to to mention that this may not work when you are dealing with a SQL engine that rejects queries with aggregate functions on the right-hand side of comparison operators. In that case, use this form of the query:

SELECT MAX(col_name) FROM table_name WHERE col_name < (SELECT MAX(col_name) FROM table_name)
Anonymous said…
The solutions using Top will not work if there are employees receiving the same salary (which is common in an organization). I think the solution with Max is a better solution.
Vadivel said…
If there are duplicates the query doesn't work properly. I have provided an updated solution here -

http://vadivel.blogspot.com/2011/09/sql-server-2005-finding-2nd-highest.html

Popular posts from this blog

Script table as - ALTER TO is greyed out - SQL SERVER

One of my office colleague recently asked me why we are not able to generate ALTER Table script from SSMS. If we right click on the table and choose "Script Table As"  ALTER To option would be disabled or Greyed out. Is it a bug? No it isn't a bug. ALTER To is there to be used for generating modified script of Stored Procedure, Functions, Views, Triggers etc., and NOT for Tables. For generating ALTER Table script there is an work around. Right click on the table, choose "Modify" and enter into the design mode. Make what ever changes you want to make and WITHOUT saving it right click anywhere on the top half of the window (above Column properties) and choose "Generate Change Script". Please be advised that SQL Server would drop actually create a new table with modifications, move the data from the old table into it and then drop the old table. Sounds simple but assume you have a very large table for which you want to do this! Then it woul

AWS fatal error: An error occurred (400) when calling the HeadObject operation: Bad Request

While using AWS and trying to copy a file from a S3 bucket to my EC2 instance ended up with this error message. Command Used: aws s3 cp s3://mybucketname/myfilename.html /var/www/html/ Error: fatal error: An error occurred (400) when calling the HeadObject operation: Bad Request The error goes off if we add the region information to the command statement. I am using Asia Pacific (Mumbai) so used ap-south-1 as the region name. Modified Command: aws s3 cp s3://mybucketname/myfilename.html /var/www/html/ --region ap-south-1

[Non Tech] Want to know the recipe for Omelette :)

Fed up with Bread - Jam and Curd Rice, today i wanted to eat Omelette. Interesting part is I wanted to cook it myself :) So in the first picture you see all the items which are needed for preparing an Omelette. When I had a closer look at the eggs I see that almost all the eggs are broken. But believe me when I bought it couple of days back it was in perfect condition! I was wondering whether the eggs have become rotten or pretty old to consume! I tried taking an egg and break it but couldn't break it at all :) Since I have kept in the freezer all the eggs have frozen and looked like a iron ball :) After trying for few minutes of trying i removed the shell of the egg and then kept that iron ball :) into a bowl and placed it within Oven. I heated it for 1 minute and checked. It melted only to a limit. So i just set it for another 2 minutes and checked it later. It has melted but the part of the egg white has become a Omelette :( I didn't leave it there. I took the bowl out of