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

My Wedding Anniversary :)

Six years back on the same day I married Sai Lakshmi (12-July-2000). I know Sai for almost 13 years now :) I fell in love with her during my 12th standard. I know @ 17 yrs any person wouldn't be matured enough to make a big decision like this. But thank God my choice was perfect :) Even now, very often we used to think about the past and laugh at our behaviors/actions then. My love story would be really interesting (at least for me and Sai :)) and I am sure none of you guys would be interested in reading about it so lemme not get into it in-depth. But one thing which I want to share is "Without Sai, I wouldn't have entered into the IT field at all". She was instrumental in convincing me to study my Master's degree in Computer Application. That's the move that changed my career. Till my schooling, my dream was to either become a "big" sportsman (Cricket and Badminton were my favorites at that time.) or an Aeronautics engineer. Unfortunately, my l...

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...

What should one look @ while buying a land in chennai?

Offlate people have started thinking about investing their money in lands. I too think that to be a wise decision only! As most of us know buying a land in chennai (for that matter any where in the world) isn't an easy affair. I was just wondering what all one needs to look at before deciding to purchase a land. I thought I would put down what ever I know about this subject here. [Guys pls free to correct me if I my understanding is wrong somewhere. That way, it would help me understand as well as others who might read this in future]. Here we go ... 1. One should not buy farm lands if they want to build a residential house sometime later there. Because to my knowledge its illegal to build residential houses on lands meant for irrigation. 2. Encumberance Certificate -- This is what is shortly refered as "EC". One needs to get an EC from local sub registrar office (i guess we need pay a small amount for this). From this we / our lawyers :) can find out whether the guy who ...