The problem of finding the *nth* highest salary from a table that contains employee salaries is quite popular.

While the problem may seem daunting at first, it is not too difficult to solve once the problem is clear.

#   
#  The problem

The problem of finding the *nth* highest salary is as follows:

Given a table that contains employee salaries for an organization, find the *nth* highest salary.

Here, *n* can take on any value. A value of `1` would mean we are tasked with finding the highest salary within the organization, `2` represents the second-highest salary, and so on.

## 
## The solution

Let's consider the following table:

Employee_Salaries

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## Step 1: Order the table

When finding the *nth* highest salary, the first step is to order the table in descending order with respect to salary.

This way, the highest salary will be on the top of the table and others will follow in order of decreasing salaries.

In SQL, this is can be written as follows:

```mysql
select distinct salary from Employee_Salaries
order by salary desc
```

To cater to repeating salaries, such as `3000` in the above table, we can add the keyword `distinct` to ensure that our result table contains no duplicate values.

The table now looks like this:

#  Step 2: Find the nth highest salary

After Step 1, we obtained a table (`A`) that contains all the salaries sorted in descending order.

This means that the *nth* highest salary is on the *nth* row of `A`. There are many ways you could access the *nth* row exactly. We will use the `min` function and the `limit` keyword. The *nth* highest salary is the minimum salary among the top *n* rows of `A`.

We can write the SQL as follows:

```mysql
select min(salary) 
from A limit n
```
>The `min` function returns the minimum value for a column in a table.

>The `limit` function returns the first `n` rows.

This will return the *nth* highest salary.

## Step 3: Putting it all together

Now, we can move on to combining the above queries to form the final query that returns the *nth* highest salary.

The query becomes (n = 5):

```mysql
select min(salary)
from (
select distinct salary
from Employee_Salaries
order by salary desc
limit 5
)

```

##  
## Code



CREATE TABLE Employee_Salaries(
  ID int PRIMARY KEY,
  Name varchar(20),
  Salary int
);

INSERT INTO Employee_Salaries
VALUES (1, 'Harry', 3000);
INSERT INTO Employee_Salaries
VALUES (2, 'Jane', 3000);
INSERT INTO Employee_Salaries
VALUES (3, 'Sam', 8000);
INSERT INTO Employee_Salaries
VALUES (4, 'Claire', 5500);
INSERT INTO Employee_Salaries
VALUES (5, 'Bob', 4000);
INSERT INTO Employee_Salaries
VALUES (6, 'Alice', 4500);
INSERT INTO Employee_Salaries
VALUES (7, 'Henry', 6000);
INSERT INTO Employee_Salaries
VALUES (8, 'Kim', 2500);
INSERT INTO Employee_Salaries
VALUES (9, 'Tom', 5000);
INSERT INTO Employee_Salaries
VALUES (10, 'Hannah', 6500);

SELECT min(Salary) FROM (
SELECT distinct Salary from Employee_Salaries 
order by Salary desc
limit 5 # This is n
) AS A


How to find the nth highest salary from a table using SQL

Order the salaries in descending order, select distinct values, and find the minimum among the top n rows.

EID	ENAME	SALARY
1	Harry	3000
2	Jane	3000
3	Sam	8000
4	Claire	5500
5	Bob	4000
6	Alice	4500
7	Henry	6000
8	Kim	2500
9	Tom	5000
10	Hannah	6500