Second Highest Salary SQL | Dataford Interview Questions

Your question is Second Highest Salary SQL. Start with the requirements and the two tables on the right.

Run and submit as often as you like. When you're ready, talk me through your approach or go straight to the code.

Problem

Tech Mahindra's workforce analytics dashboard needs to identify the second-highest salary in each department. Write a PostgreSQL query that handles employees with missing salary values and does not treat duplicate salaries as different rank positions.

Requirements

Join employees to departments and return the department name with its second-highest distinct, non-null salary.
Exclude employees whose salary is NULL before ranking.
Use a ranking approach where employees with the same salary share the same position.
Return one row per department that has at least two distinct non-null salary values, ordered alphabetically by department name.

Schema

departments

Column	Type	Description
department_idPK	INT	Unique department identifier
department_name	VARCHAR(100)	Name of the department

employees

Column	Type	Description
employee_idPK	INT	Unique employee identifier
employee_name	VARCHAR(100)	Employee's full name
department_id	INT	References departments.department_id
salary	NUMERIC(12,2)	Annual employee salary