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

Another intuitive way is :- Suppose we want to find Nth highest salary then

1) Sort Employee as per descending order of salary

2) Take first N records using rownum. So in this step Nth record here is Nth highest salary

3) Now sort this temporary result in ascending order. Thus Nth highest salary is now first record

4) Get first record from this temporary result.

It will be Nth highest salary.

select * from 
 (select * from 
   (select * from  
       (select * from emp order by sal desc)  
   where rownum<=:N )  
 order by sal )
where rownum=1;

In case there are repeating salaries then in innermost query distinct can be used.

select * from 
 (select * from 
   (select * from  
       (select distinct(sal) from emp order by 1 desc)  
   where rownum<=:N )  
 order by sal )
where rownum=1;