SQL Top-N Highest Salary | Dataford Interview Questions

YASH Technologies needs a workforce report showing its highest-paid active employees. Write a PostgreSQL query to identify the first three active employees by salary and include their department names.

Requirements

Consider only employees whose employment_status is Active.
Rank employees by salary from highest to lowest using a window function. Treat employees with equal salaries deterministically by ordering by employee_id as a tie-breaker.
Return the first three ranked employees with their ID, name, department, salary, and rank.
Use a LEFT JOIN so an employee is not removed if the department reference is missing. Sort the final result by salary descending and employee ID ascending.

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(12,2)	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 display name

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