Nth Highest Salary Query in Oracle 9i/10g/11g/11i

Problem: Show the list of all employees from the employee table having second highest Salary or Nth highest salary in the organization.

Solution: Well we can achieve the result by so many ways but in this post I would like to do it by using co-related queries.
Query to get the list of employees getting 2nd highest salary (Set the value of @SalaryPosition to get Nth highest salary):




SELECT * FROM Employee E1  WHERE @SalaryPosition = ( SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT E2.Salary) FROM Employee E2 WHERE E2.Salary >= E1.Salary )



Co-Related Query:  In short, it’s a type of nested sub query where the inner query is referenced to some value of the outer query. And the inner query is executed for each record in the outer query making it slowL.
     In our query, to get the 2nd highest salary, works in the same way too. Let’s dive a little deeper.

Sample data used in employee table:


slNo           empname               salary


101            Ram                      5000
102            Abhishek              7500
101            kumar                   5000
104            prasad                  6570
102            Jumla                    7500
101           Harkesh                12000
101           John                      4000

So we have taken two aliases for the employee table i.e. E1 and E2.(Here N=2)

Corollary: Let’s take the first record in the table E1 where the salary is 5000 and assume it as the second highest salary. But how will you know if it is actually the second highest salary or not. If 5000 is the second highest salary, then the distinct count of all the salaries from table E2 which are greater than or equal to 5000 must be 2.

The first record from E1 (salary = 5000) will be compared to all the records in E2 (salary).


Table E1                                         Table E2                                                  Distinct count where
(considering the first record only)   (distinct salary)                                           salary is >= 5000

5000                                               4000                                                                   4
                                                       5000
                                                       6570
                                                       7500
                                                      12000

Hence 5000 is not the highest salary as we have 4 more salaries greater than equal to 5000. But it is concluded that 5000 is at the fourth position.

     Now let’s take the second salary from table E1 and do the same comparison as in the earlier case.

The second salary is 7500 and as per rule the count of distinct salaries greater than equal to 7500 must be 2.

   Table E1                                         Table E2                                                Distinct count where
(considering the second record only)  (distinct salary)                                       salary is >= 5000


7500                                                  4000                                                                 2
                                                          5000
                                                         6570
                                                         7500
                                                         12000


Here in this case our condition in the where clause of outer query is satisfying.

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