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Second Highest Salary per Department
Find the employee with the second highest salary in each department. Use DENSE_RANK so tied salaries share the same rank. Show name, department, salary, and salary_rank. If a department has only 1 employee, exclude it. Sort by department. This exact question appears on LeetCode's top-50 SQL list and is asked at Amazon, Meta, and Google.
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Schema
employees
| emp_id | name | department | position | salary | hire_date | manager_id | performance_rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Alice Johnson | Engineering | Senior Developer | 95000 | 2019-03-15 | 5 | 4.5 |
| 2 | Bob Smith | Engineering | Developer | 75000 | 2020-06-01 | 1 | 3.8 |
| 3 | Carol Williams | Marketing | Marketing Manager | 85000 | 2018-09-20 | NULL | 4.2 |
Expected output: name of 95K employee, salary_rank: 2
Hint
Concepts
SELECT Window Functions DENSE_RANK PARTITION BY CTE Window Functions + CTE
Practise the topic: SQL practice questions · Window function practice · CTE practice · Ranking function practice · Advanced SQL interview questions
Read the concept: SQL running total
In these company practice sets
Amazon · Google · Meta · NVIDIA · Snowflake · Goldman Sachs · Bloomberg
A SQL Quest challenge matched to patterns reported for these companies — not a question any of them has published.
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