Find max and second max salary for a employee table MySQL

Question

Assume you are given the following straightforward database table, Employee, which has the columns Employee ID and Salary:

 Employee
  Employee ID    Salary
   3            200
   4            800
   7            450

I wish to write a query select max(salary) as max_salary, 2nd_max_salary from employee.

Then it should return:

  max_salary   2nd_max_salary
   800             450

I know how to find 2nd highest salary:

   SELECT MAX(Salary) FROM Employee
  WHERE Salary NOT IN (SELECT MAX(Salary) FROM Employee )

Or to find the nth:

  SELECT FROM Employee Emp1 WHERE (N-1) = ( SELECT COUNT(DISTINCT(Emp2.Salary)) FROM Employee Emp2
  WHERE Emp2.Salary > Emp1.Salary)

I am not able to how to join these 2 results for the desired result. Can someone please help me with this?

Answer 1

To retrieve two columns, simply perform two inner queries:

select
  (SELECT MAX(Salary) FROM Employee) maxsalary,
  (SELECT MAX(Salary) FROM Employee
  WHERE Salary NOT IN (SELECT MAX(Salary) FROM Employee )) as [2nd_max_salary]

I hope this helps you.