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

I think you would want to use DENSE_RANK as you don't know how many employees have the same salary and you did say you wanted nameS of employees.

CREATE TABLE #Test
(
    Id INT,
    Name NVARCHAR(12),
    Salary MONEY
)

SELECT x.Name, x.Salary
FROM
        (
        SELECT  Name, Salary, DENSE_RANK() OVER (ORDER BY Salary DESC) as Rnk
        FROM    #Test
        ) x
WHERE x.Rnk = 2

ROW_NUMBER would give you unique numbering even if the salaries tied, and plain RANK would not give you a '2' as a rank if you had multiple people tying for highest salary. I've corrected this as DENSE_RANK does the best job for this.