Second Maximum Salary Query | Dataford Interview Questions

HashedIn's engineering dashboard needs to identify active employees whose compensation is the second-highest distinct salary in the company. Write a PostgreSQL query that also displays each employee's department when available.

Requirements

Consider only employees where is_active is TRUE and salary is not NULL.
Use a ranking technique that treats tied salaries as one salary level.
Return every employee at the second-highest distinct salary, including employees whose department reference has no match.
Sort the output by employee_id ascending.

Schema

employees

Column	Type	Description
employee_idPK	INTEGER	Unique employee identifier
employee_name	VARCHAR(100)	Employee's full name
salary	NUMERIC(12,2)	Annual employee salary
department_id	INTEGER	Referenced department identifier
is_active	BOOLEAN	Whether the employee is currently active

departments

Column	Type	Description
department_idPK	INTEGER	Unique department identifier
department_name	VARCHAR(100)	Department name

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