SQL query to find third highest salary in company

Question

I need to create a query that returns the company's third highest-paid employee.

I attempted to achieve this using subqueries but was unable. Here are some of my attempts:

select Max(sal)
from employee_table
where sal not in

 (select Max(sal)
from employee_table
where sal not in 

(select Max(sal)
from employee_table));

Answer 1

The easiest way to work this out would be to:

SELECT * FROM `employee_table` ORDER BY `sal` DESC LIMIT 1 OFFSET 2;

Which orders employees by salary and then tells db to return one result (1 in LIMIT) counting from third row in result set (2 in OFFSET). It may be OFFSET 3 if your DB counts result rows from 1 and not from 0.

This should work in MySQL and PostgreSQL.