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Top Earning Employees

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Question Explain

This question is asking you to write a SQL query to identify the top-earning employees. It is assumed that there is a table in the database (for instance, named employees) that stores employee data, including the employee’s salary.

The main points to consider in order to answer this question include:

  1. You need to fully understand the SQL SELECT statement, which is used to select data from a database.

  2. You need knowledge of the ORDER BY clause in SQL, which is used to sort the result set in ascending or descending order.

  3. You also need to understand the usage of the LIMIT clause in SQL, which is used to specify the maximum number of records to return.

  4. The question does not specify the number of the top-earning employees to return, you may have to decide this number or take it as a parameter.

Answer Example 1

Let's assume we would like to list the top 10 highest earning employees. Below is an example of a query which could be used:

SELECT * FROM employees
ORDER BY salary DESC
LIMIT 10;

Here, the SQL command SELECT * FROM employees is used to select all records from the employees table. The ORDER BY salary DESC command sorts the records in descending order based on the salary. Finally, if we want to limit the output to a certain number of records, LIMIT 10 is used to limit the output to the top 10 records according to the sorted order.

Answer Example 2

If you want to make the number of top-earning employees to return flexible, you can use a parameter (for instance, named num) to specify the number:

SELECT * FROM employees
ORDER BY salary DESC
LIMIT :num;

Here, :num is a placeholder for the number of employees to return, which can be replaced by any number according to the situation. This approach gives you more flexibility, especially when the code is part of a larger system or application.

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