How to get second-highest salary employees in a table

Question

It\'s a question I got this afternoon:

There a table contains ID, Name, and Salary of Employees, get names of the second-highest salary employees, in SQL Server

Answer 1

How about a CTE?

;WITH Salaries AS
(
    SELECT Name, Salary,
       DENSE_RANK() OVER(ORDER BY Salary DESC) AS 'SalaryRank'
    FROM 
        dbo.Employees
)
SELECT Name, Salary
FROM Salaries  
WHERE SalaryRank = 2

DENSE_RANK() will give you all the employees who have the second highest salary - no matter how many employees have the (identical) highest salary.