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Non-Sales Roster (NOT IN)

EasyFreeQuerying Basics

HR is preparing a roster for the technical and operational teams — everyone who is not in a customer-facing department. Exclude Sales, Marketing, and HR. Show name, department, salary. Order by salary descending, then name ascending.

NOT IN is the clean way to exclude a small set of values without stacking multiple AND department != ... clauses. Just be aware: if the subquery / list ever contains a NULL, NOT IN silently returns no rows. Here the list is a hardcoded set of strings, so we're safe.

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Schema

employees

emp_idnamedepartmentpositionsalaryhire_datemanager_idperformance_rating
1Alice JohnsonEngineeringSenior Developer950002019-03-1554.5
2Bob SmithEngineeringDeveloper750002020-06-0113.8
3Carol WilliamsMarketingMarketing Manager850002018-09-20NULL4.2

Expected output: Engineering and Finance employees only

Hint

WHERE department NOT IN ('Sales', 'Marketing', 'HR'). String values are case-sensitive in equality comparisons — match the casing in the data.

Concepts

SELECT WHERE NOT IN ORDER BY

Practise the topic: SQL practice questions

Read the concept: Practice SQL with no setup

The trap to watch for: NOT IN with NULL

In these company practice sets

Plaid

A SQL Quest challenge matched to patterns reported for these companies — not a question any of them has published.

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