Second Highest Salary

LeetCode 176 | Difficulty: Medium

Medium

Problem Description

Table: Employee

+-------------+------+
| Column Name | Type |
+-------------+------+
| id          | int  |
| salary      | int  |
+-------------+------+
id is the primary key (column with unique values) for this table.
Each row of this table contains information about the salary of an employee.

Write a solution to find the second highest distinct salary from the Employee table. If there is no second highest salary, return null (return None in Pandas).

The result format is in the following example.

Example 1:

Input: 
Employee table:
+----+--------+
| id | salary |
+----+--------+
| 1  | 100    |
| 2  | 200    |
| 3  | 300    |
+----+--------+
Output: 
+---------------------+
| SecondHighestSalary |
+---------------------+
| 200                 |
+---------------------+

Example 2:

Input: 
Employee table:
+----+--------+
| id | salary |
+----+--------+
| 1  | 100    |
+----+--------+
Output: 
+---------------------+
| SecondHighestSalary |
+---------------------+
| null                |
+---------------------+

Topics: Database

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Solutions

Solution 1: MySQL (Best: 110 ms)

Metric	Value
Runtime	110 ms
Memory	N/A
Date	2018-04-12

Solution

# Write your MySQL query statement below
select max(Salary) as SecondHighestSalary from Employee
where Salary not in (select max(Salary) as maxsal from Employee)
order by Salary desc

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Complexity Analysis

Approach	Time	Space
Solution	$O(n)$	$O(1) to O(n)$

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Interview Tips

Key Points

• Discuss the brute force approach first, then optimize. Explain your thought process.