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BasicSQL~6 min

Second highest salary

The most asked SQL question in QA interviews

Points available

100/100

Your mission

  1. Read
  2. 2Run
  3. 3Submit
  4. 4Solve

Using the employees table, return the second highest distinct salary as a single column named salary.

Runs on the QA Shop practice database (customers, products, orders, order_items, payments, employees, bugs, test_runs, audit_log). Each run starts from a fresh copy.

Hints

Each hint costs 10 points on a full solve.

Interviewer follow-ups

  • How would you get the N-th highest?
  • What if two people share the top salary?

Ctrl+Enter to run · add Shift to submit

1
2
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Tab inserts two spaces. Press Escape, then Tab, to leave the editor.
Terminal

$ sqlite3 qa-shop.db < solution.sql

Run executes the open file. Submit scores solution.sql against hidden tests.

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