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4th Lowest Salary Employee
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4th Lowest Salary Employee

MediumSQL · PostgreSQL

Problem

Afiniti’s compensation analytics team needs to identify employees at the fourth-lowest salary level among active employees. Write a PostgreSQL query that returns every employee tied at that salary level, along with the department name when available.

Requirements

  1. Consider only active employees with non-NULL salaries.
  2. Rank distinct salary values from lowest to highest using a window function.
  3. Return all employees with rank 4, including ties, and preserve employees whose department reference has no match.
  4. Return results in ascending employee_id order.

Schema

employees
ColumnTypeDescription
employee_idPKINTEGERUnique employee identifier
employee_nameVARCHAR(100)Employee full name
salaryNUMERIC(10,2)Annual employee salary
employment_statusVARCHAR(20)Current employment status
department_idINTEGERReferenced department identifier
departments
ColumnTypeDescription
department_idPKINTEGERUnique department identifier
department_nameVARCHAR(100)Department name
Tablesemployeesdepartments
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