SQL for Second Lowest Salary | Dataford Interview Questions

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

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Problem

Wipro's HR reporting team needs to identify employees earning the second lowest distinct salary among currently active employees. Write a PostgreSQL query that returns the qualifying employees and their department details.

Requirements

Consider only employees whose employment_status is Active and whose salary is not NULL.
Use a window function to rank distinct salary levels, then return every employee tied at the second lowest salary.
Preserve qualifying employees even when no matching department exists, and sort the result by salary and employee name.

Schema

employees

Column	Type	Description
employee_idPK	INT	Unique employee identifier
employee_name	VARCHAR(100)	Employee's full name
department_id	INT	Referenced department identifier
salary	NUMERIC(10,2)	Annual employee salary
employment_status	VARCHAR(20)	Current employment status

departments

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