Window Functions and Top Salaries | Dataford Interview Questions

Inc. In wants to identify the highest-paid employees within each department for compensation analysis. Write a PostgreSQL query that ranks employees independently within their departments and returns the top three salaries per department.

Requirements

Join employees to departments using department_id.
Exclude employees whose salary is NULL.
Use a window function to rank salaries in descending order within each department, breaking ties by employee_id.
Return employees ranked 1 through 3, ordered by department name and salary descending.

Schema

departments

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

employees

Column	Type	Description
employee_idPK	INT	Unique employee identifier
employee_name	VARCHAR(100)	Employee's full name
department_id	INT	Department assigned to the employee
salary	NUMERIC(10,2)	Annual employee salary

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