SQL Second Highest Salary | Dataford Interview Questions

S&P Global needs a compensation validation query for employee records used in internal QA reporting. Write a PostgreSQL query to return the second distinct highest salary from the employees table without using analytical or window functions.

Requirements

Return one row with the alias second_highest_salary.
Treat duplicate salary values as one salary rank.
Ignore NULL salaries and return NULL if fewer than two distinct non-NULL salaries exist.
Do not use RANK, DENSE_RANK, ROW_NUMBER, or other window functions.

Schema

employees

Column	Type	Description
employee_idPK	INT	Unique employee identifier
employee_name	VARCHAR(100)	Employee name
department	VARCHAR(50)	Organizational department
salary	NUMERIC(12,2)	Annual salary

Your question is SQL Second Highest Salary. Start with the requirements and the one table in the Question tab.

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

Problem

Requirements

Return one row with the alias second_highest_salary.
Treat duplicate salary values as one salary rank.
Ignore NULL salaries and return NULL if fewer than two distinct non-NULL salaries exist.
Do not use RANK, DENSE_RANK, ROW_NUMBER, or other window functions.

Schema

employees

Column	Type	Description
employee_idPK	INT	Unique employee identifier
employee_name	VARCHAR(100)	Employee name
department	VARCHAR(50)	Organizational department
salary	NUMERIC(12,2)	Annual salary

Your question is SQL Second Highest Salary. Start with the requirements and the one table in the Question tab.

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