How should I practice Fifth Highest Salary In A Department?

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Problem · Database

Fifth Highest Salary In A Department

● Medium

ZSNEW GRADONSITE INTERVIEW

Problem statement

The table employees stores one row per employee, including that employee's department and salary.

For each department, rank that department's distinct salary values from highest to lowest using dense ranks. Equal salaries share one rank. Return the salary whose dense rank is exactly 5.

Omit any department that has fewer than five distinct salary values. Return department_id and fifth_highest_salary. Order rows by department_id ascending.

What the interview report shared

The interviewer asked SQL for the fifth-highest salary within a department, then asked how to order the result deterministically when salaries tie.

employees
Column	Meaning
`employee_id`	Unique employee identifier
`employee_name`	Employee display name
`department_id`	Department identifier
`salary`	Employee salary

Table schema

MySQLPostgreSQLPandas

Use the same input data with any supported language. Open the Schema tab in the editor to see the generated SQL setup or Pandas DataFrames.

employees

One row per employee.

Column	Type	Nullable	Description
employee_idPK	Integer	No	—
employee_name	Text	No	—
department_id	Integer	No	—
salary	Integer	No	—

Expected result

Your query or function must return these columns.

Column	Type	Nullable	Description
department_id	Integer	No	—
fifth_highest_salary	Integer	No	—

Row order: must match exactly. Numeric tolerance: 0.

Constraints

The employees table has between 1 and 10^5 rows.
employee_id is unique and non-null.
employee_name, department_id, and salary are non-null.
0 <= salary <= 10^9.