How to find third or nᵗʰ maximum salary from salary table?

Question

How to find third or n^th maximum salary from salary table(EmpID, EmpName, EmpSalary) in optimized way?

Answer 1

Find Nth highest salary from a table. Here is a way to do this task using dense_rank() function.

select linkorder from u_links

select max(linkorder) from u_links

select max(linkorder) from u_links where linkorder < (select max(linkorder) from u_links)

select top 1 linkorder 
       from ( select distinct top 2 linkorder from u_links order by linkorder desc) tmp 
order by linkorder asc

DENSE_RANK : 1. DENSE_RANK computes the rank of a row in an ordered group of rows and returns the rank as a NUMBER. The ranks are consecutive integers beginning with 1. 2. This function accepts arguments as any numeric data type and returns NUMBER. 3. As an analytic function, DENSE_RANK computes the rank of each row returned from a query with respect to the other rows, based on the values of the value_exprs in the order_by_clause. 4. In the above query the rank is returned based on sal of the employee table. In case of tie, it assigns equal rank to all the rows.

WITH result AS ( 
     SELECT linkorder ,DENSE_RANK() OVER ( ORDER BY linkorder DESC ) AS  DanseRank 
FROM u_links ) 
SELECT TOP 1 linkorder FROM result WHERE DanseRank = 5