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

In SQL Server 2012+, OFFSET...FETCH would be an efficient way to achieve this:

DECLARE @N AS INT;
SET @N = 3;

SELECT
    EmpSalary
FROM
    dbo.Salary
ORDER BY
    EmpSalary DESC
OFFSET (@N-1) ROWS
FETCH NEXT 1 ROWS ONLY