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

There are two way to do this first:

Use subquery to find the 2nd highest

SELECT MAX(salary) FROM employees
WHERE salary NOT IN (
SELECT MAX (salary) FROM employees)

But this solution is not much good as if you need to find out the 10 or 100th highest then you may be in trouble. So instead go for window function like

select * from
(
select salary,ROW_NUMBER() over( 
order by Salary desc) as
rownum from    employees
) as t where t.rownum=2

By using this method you can find out nth highest salary without any trouble.