Which employees will be selected as the top two highest paid employees in each department?

The result set will contain the two employees with the highest salaries in every department. A common way to produce this list is to use a window function:

SELECT empid, ename, dept_id, salary

FROM (

SELECT e.*, ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY dept_id ORDER BY salary DESC) AS rn

FROM employee e

) t

WHERE rn <= 2;

Here, ROW_NUMBER() assigns 1 to the highest paid employee in each department, 2 to the second highest, and so on. The outer query keeps only rows where rn is 1 or 2. This method is efficient and works in most SQL dialects. If your database lacks window functions, you could use a correlated subquery with LIMIT 2 per department, but the window approach is preferred for readability and performance.