How can I pull out the second highest product usage from a SQL Server table? - sql

Question

We have a product usage table for software. It has 4 fields, [product name], [usage month], [users] and [Country]. We must report the data by Country and Product Name for licensing purposes. Our rule is to report the second highest number of users per country for each product. The same products can be used in all countries. It based on monthly usage numbers, so second peak usage for fy 2020. Since all of the data is in one table I am having trouble figuring out the SQL to get the information I need from the table.
I am thinking I need to do multiple selects (inner select? ) and group the data in a way to pull out the product name, peak usage and country. But that is where I am getting confused as to the best approach.
Example Data looks like this:
[product name], [usage month], [users], [Country]
Product1 January 831 United States of America
Product1 December 802 United States of America
Product1 September 687 United States of America
Product1 August 407 United States of America
Product1 July 799 United States of America
Product1 June 824 United States of America
Product1 April 802 United States of America
Product1 May 796 United States of America
Product1 February 847 United States of America
Product1 March 840 United States of America
Product1 November 818 United States of America
Product1 October 841 United States of America
Product2 March 1006 United States of America
Product2 February 1076 United States of America
Product2 April 890 United States of America
Product2 May 831 United States of America
Product2 September 538 United States of America
Product2 October 1053 United States of America
Product2 July 673 United States of America
Product2 August 87 United States of America
Product2 November 994 United States of America
Product2 January 1042 United States of America
Product2 December 952 United States of America
Product2 June 873 United States of America
I had originally thought about breaking this out into multiple tables and then trying sql against each product table, but since this is something I will need to do monthly, I didn't want to redesign the ETL that loads the data because 1) I don't control that ETL and 2) I felt like that would be a move backwards for a repetitive task. We were also looking into Power BI to do this for us, but haven't foound the right approach, and I would honestly rather have this in SQL.

Answer 1

If I follow you correctly:
select *
from (
select t.*,
row_number() over(partition by product_name, country order by users desc) rn
from mytable t
) t
where rn = 2
This generates one row per product and country, that corresponds to the second highest number of users.

Answer 2

For one country it should be fairly simple. This is off the top of my head, but a bit of tweaking should do it. This comes from your table names, which is likely way off (right?).
SELECT top 2 users
FROM ProductCounts
WHERE County = #Country
ORDER BY users DESC
LIMIT 1;
I don't really get a sense of how your data is entered to get a good feel of a better way to store the data to get the information you desire for your report.

Answer 3

You can use this, it returns the second highest user count grouped by first country and second product. Take as note that when there is only 1 user count per country and product the it will not show up, there have to be at least two user counts per country and product.
SELECT
country, product, users
FROM
ProductCounts
WHERE
(SELECT COUNT(*) FROM ProductCounts AS p
WHERE
p.country = ProductCounts.country
AND
p.product = ProductCounts.product
AND
p.users >= ProductCounts.users ) = 2
GROUP BY
country, product