How would you find the third highest salary in the employees table, not department-wise?

To find the third highest salary in the employees table without grouping by department, you can use a ranking function or a subquery. A common approach is to use the ROW_NUMBER() window function partitioned over the entire table, ordering salaries in descending order, and then filter for row number 3. Example in SQL Server: SELECT salary FROM (SELECT salary, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (ORDER BY salary DESC) AS rn FROM employees) AS t WHERE rn = 3; This returns the third highest distinct salary. If you need to ignore duplicates, use DENSE_RANK() instead of ROW_NUMBER(). Alternatively, you can use a subquery that selects the distinct salaries, orders them, and limits the result: SELECT DISTINCT salary FROM employees ORDER BY salary DESC LIMIT 2,1; In MySQL, you can use LIMIT 2,1 to skip the top two salaries. Both methods give the third highest salary across all departments, satisfying the requirement.