SQL query to find Nth highest salary from a salary table - sql

Question

How can I find the Nth highest salary in a table containing salaries in SQL Server?

Answer 1

You can use a Common Table Expression (CTE) to derive the answer.
Let's say you have the following salaries in the table Salaries:
EmployeeID Salary
--------------------
10101 50,000
90140 35,000
90151 72,000
18010 39,000
92389 80,000
We will use:
DECLARE #N int
SET #N = 3 -- Change the value here to pick a different salary rank
SELECT Salary
FROM (
SELECT row_number() OVER (ORDER BY Salary DESC) as SalaryRank, Salary
FROM Salaries
) as SalaryCTE
WHERE SalaryRank = #N
This will create a row number for each row after it has been sorted by the Salary in descending order, then retrieve the third row (which contains the third-highest record).
SQL Fiddle
For those of you who don't want a CTE (or are stuck in SQL 2000):
[Note: this performs noticably worse than the above example; running them side-by-side with an exceution plans shows a query cost of 36% for the CTE and 64% for the subquery]:
SELECT TOP 1 Salary
FROM
(
SELECT TOP N Salary
FROM Salaries
ORDER BY Salary DESC
) SalarySubquery
ORDER BY Salary ASC
where N is defined by you.
SalarySubquery is the alias I have given to the subquery, or the query that is in parentheses.
What the subquery does is it selects the top N salaries (we'll say 3 in this case), and orders them by the greatest salary.
If we want to see the third-highest salary, the subquery would return:
Salary
-----------
80,000
72,000
50,000
The outer query then selects the first salary from the subquery, except we're sorting it ascending this time, which sorts from smallest to largest, so 50,000 would be the first record sorted ascending.
As you can see, 50,000 is indeed the third-highest salary in the example.

Answer 2

You could use row_number to pick a specific row. For example, the 42nd highest salary:
select *
from (
select row_number() over (order by Salary desc) as rn
, *
from YourTable
) as Subquery
where rn = 42
Windowed functions like row_number can only appear in select or order by clauses. The workaround is placing the row_number in a subquery.

Answer 3

select MIN(salary) from (
select top 5 salary from employees order by salary desc) x

Answer 4

EmpID Name Salary
1 A 100
2 B 800
3 C 300
4 D 400
5 E 500
6 F 200
7 G 600
SELECT * FROM Employee E1
WHERE (N-1) = (
SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT(E2.Salary))
FROM Employee E2
WHERE E2.Salary > E1.Salary
)
Suppose you want to find 5th highest salary, which means there are total 4 employees who have salary greater than 5th highest employee. So for each row from the outer query check the total number of salaries which are greater than current salary. Outer query will work for 100 first and check for number of salaries greater than 100. It will be 6, do not match (5-1) = 6 where clause of outerquery. Then for 800, and check for number of salaries greater than 800, 4=0 false then work for 300 and finally there are totally 4 records in the table which are greater than 300. Therefore 4=4 will meet the where clause and will return
3 C 300.

Answer 5

try it...
use table_name
select MAX(salary)
from emp_salary
WHERE marks NOT IN (select MAX(marks)
from student_marks )

Answer 6

Simple way WITHOUT using any special feature specific to Oracle, MySQL etc.
Suppose in EMPLOYEE table Salaries can be repeated.
Use query to find out rank of each ID.
select *
from (
select tout.sal, id, (select count(*) +1 from (select distinct(sal) distsal from
EMPLOYEE ) where distsal >tout.sal) as rank from EMPLOYEE tout
) result
order by rank
First we find out distinct salaries. Then we find out count of distinct salaries greater than each row. This is nothing but the rank of that id. For highest salary, this count will be zero. So '+1' is done to start rank from 1.
Now we can get IDs at Nth rank by adding where clause to above query.
select *
from (
select tout.sal, id, (select count(*) +1 from (select distinct(sal) distsal from
EMPLOYEE ) where distsal >tout.sal) as rank from EMPLOYEE tout
) result
where rank = N;

Answer 7

The easiest method is to get 2nd higest salary from table in SQL:
sql> select max(sal) from emp where sal not in (select max(sal) from emp);

Answer 8

Dont forget to use the distinct keyword:-
SELECT TOP 1 Salary
FROM
(
SELECT Distinct TOP N Salary
FROM Salaries
ORDER BY Salary DESC
) SalarySubquery
ORDER BY Salary ASC

Answer 9

Solution 1: This SQL to find the Nth highest salary should work in SQL Server, MySQL, DB2, Oracle, Teradata, and almost any other RDBMS: (note: low performance because of subquery)
SELECT * /*This is the outer query part */
FROM Employee Emp1
WHERE (N-1) = ( /* Subquery starts here */
SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT(Emp2.Salary))
FROM Employee Emp2
WHERE Emp2.Salary > Emp1.Salary)
The most important thing to understand in the query above is that the subquery is evaluated each and every time a row is processed by the outer query. In other words, the inner query can not be processed independently of the outer query since the inner query uses the Emp1 value as well.
In order to find the Nth highest salary, we just find the salary that has exactly N-1 salaries greater than itself.
Solution 2: Find the nth highest salary using the TOP keyword in SQL Server
SELECT TOP 1 Salary
FROM (
SELECT DISTINCT TOP N Salary
FROM Employee
ORDER BY Salary DESC
) AS Emp
ORDER BY Salary
Solution 3: Find the nth highest salary in SQL Server without using TOP
SELECT Salary FROM Employee
ORDER BY Salary DESC OFFSET N-1 ROW(S)
FETCH FIRST ROW ONLY
Note that I haven’t personally tested the SQL above, and I believe that it will only work in SQL Server 2012 and up.

Answer 10

SELECT * FROM
(select distinct postalcode from Customers order by postalcode DESC)
limit 4,1;
4 here means leave first 4 and show the next 1.
Try this it works for me.

Answer 11

Very simple one query to find nth highest salary
SELECT DISTINCT(Sal) FROM emp ORDER BY Salary DESC LIMIT n,1