Top 5 Salaries SQL | Dataford Interview Questions

Tavant's ignio staffing dashboard needs a salary view for workforce planning. Write a PostgreSQL query that returns employees earning one of the five highest distinct salaries among active employees.

Requirements

Use a window function to rank distinct salary levels from highest to lowest.
Return every active employee whose salary is in the top five salary bands, including ties.
Include the employee name, department name, salary, and salary rank. Preserve employees whose department is missing or unmatched.
Exclude inactive employees and employees with a NULL salary. Order the result by salary descending and employee name ascending.

Schema

employees

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

departments

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

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