Top three salaries

SQL data engineering interview problem. Difficulty: beginner. Pattern: Sorting. About 8 minutes. Free to practice.

List the top 3 highest-paid employees from employees. Columns: name, department, salary. Order by salary descending, then name. Exclude NULL salaries.

Requirements

• Ties on salary are broken by name ascending in the ORDER BY.

Constraints

• Return exactly these columns: name, department, salary.

Examples

Input: employees name | department | salary Alice Chen | Engineering | 120000 Dan Park | Engineering | 110000 Omar Ali | Sales | 105000 Bob Kumar | Engineering | 95000 Eve Ng | Engineering | 95000 Max Reed | Sales | NULL Output: name | department | salary Alice Chen | Engineering | 120000 Dan Park | Engineering | 110000 Omar Ali | Sales | 105000 Why this passes: LIMIT 3 after sorting by salary descending keeps the three richest non-null rows.

Topics: lakebench, sql, order by, limit, top-n.

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