second highest and avg salary

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

An explanation of the solution

The SQL above first finds the highest salary value in the Employee table using “(select MAX(Salary) from Employee)”. Then, adding the “WHERE Salary NOT IN” in front basically creates a new set of Salary values that does not include the highest Salary value. For instance, if the highest salary in the Employee table is 200,000 then that value will be excluded from the results using the “NOT IN” operator, and all values except for 200,000 will be retained in the results.

This now means that the highest value in this new result set will actually be the 2nd highest value in the Employee table. So, we then select the max Salary from the new result set, and that gives us 2nd highest Salary in the Employee table. And that is how the query above works.

SELECT TOP 1 column FROM YOUR_TABLE ORDER BY column DESC