SQL LeetCode: 185. Department Top Three Salaries

Pallavi Mirajkar Dantkale
2 min readApr 3, 2021

185. Department Top Three Salaries

SQL Schema

The Employee table holds all employees. Every employee has an Id, and there is also a column for the department Id.

+----+-------+--------+--------------+
| Id | Name | Salary | DepartmentId |
+----+-------+--------+--------------+
| 1 | Joe | 85000 | 1 |
| 2 | Henry | 80000 | 2 |
| 3 | Sam | 60000 | 2 |
| 4 | Max | 90000 | 1 |
| 5 | Janet | 69000 | 1 |
| 6 | Randy | 85000 | 1 |
| 7 | Will | 70000 | 1 |
+----+-------+--------+--------------+

The Department table holds all departments of the company.

+----+----------+
| Id | Name |
+----+----------+
| 1 | IT |
| 2 | Sales |
+----+----------+

Write a SQL query to find employees who earn the top three salaries in each of the department. For the above tables, your SQL query should return the following rows (order of rows does not matter).

+------------+----------+--------+
| Department | Employee | Salary |
+------------+----------+--------+
| IT | Max | 90000 |
| IT | Randy | 85000 |
| IT | Joe | 85000 |
| IT | Will | 70000 |
| Sales | Henry | 80000 |
| Sales | Sam | 60000 |
+------------+----------+--------+

Explanation:

In IT department, Max earns the highest salary, both Randy and Joe earn the second highest salary, and Will earns the third highest salary. There are only two employees in the Sales department, Henry earns the highest salary while Sam earns the second highest salary.

SELECT
Department,
Employee,
Salary
FROM (
SELECT
d.name as Department,
e.Name as Employee,
e.Salary,
dense_rank() OVER (partition by e.DepartmentId ORDER BY e.Salary desc) as dr_salary
FROM
Employee e
JOIN Department d
ON e.DepartmentId = d.Id ) drank_table
WHERE
dr_salary <=3

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Pallavi Mirajkar Dantkale

QA Engineer / Data Analyst — Highly committed to Quality Assurance and data analysis, advocate for quality and add the right value to the organization.