Find the nth highest salary in Oracle

The answer and explanation to finding the nth highest salary in SQL

The SQL below will give you the correct answer – but you will have to plug in an actual value for N of course. This SQL to find the Nth highest salary should work in SQL Server, MySQL, DB2, Oracle, Teradata, and almost any other RDBMS:

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)

How does the query above work?

The query above can be quite confusing if you have not seen anything like it before – pay special attention to the fact that “Emp1″ appears in both the subquery (also known as an inner query) and the “outer” query. The outer query is just the part of the query that is not the subquery/inner query – both parts of the query are clearly labeled in the comments.

Find the nth highest salary in Oracle using RANK

Oracle also provides a RANK function that just assigns a ranking numeric value (with 1 being the highest) for some sorted values. So, we can use this SQL in Oracle to find the nth highest salary using the RANK function:

select * FROM (
select EmployeeID, Salary
,rank() over (order by Salary DESC) ranking
from Employee
)
WHERE ranking = N;