Find Top-3 Salaries Per Department Using SQL

employees

+----+---------+--------+---------+ | id | name | salary | dept_id | +----+---------+--------+---------+ | 1 | Alice | 120000 | 10 | | 2 | Bob | 90000 | 10 | | 3 | Charlie | 115000 | 20 | | 4 | David | 130000 | 10 | | 5 | Eve | 110000 | 20 | +----+---------+--------+---------+

Scenario

Employee compensation analysis across departments

Question

Given an employees table with salary and department columns, write SQL to return the top-3 salary amounts in each department (it’s okay if fewer than three employees tie for a salary amount).

Hints

Use window functions (ROW_NUMBER/RANK/DENSE_RANK) or MAX subqueries to isolate the three highest salaries per department.