HardSQL challenge #235WINDOW FUNCTIONRANKINGORDER

Rank All Employees by Salary with RANK()

Return every employee with their company-wide salary rank, highest paid first.

The challenge runs on the SQLabHub practice database (SQLite) and uses the employees table. You can solve it in the browser, with nothing to install.

Solve This SQL Challenge

The task

Rank employees by salary globally.

A correct answer returns 120 rows with 13 columns: id, first_name, last_name, email, department, department_id, title, salary, hire_date, manager_id, city, status, rnk.

Tables used in this challenge

`employees` 120 rows

id INTEGER (PK) · first_name TEXT · last_name TEXT · email TEXT · department TEXT · department_id INTEGER · title TEXT · salary REAL · hire_date TEXT · manager_id INTEGER · city TEXT · status TEXT

First 3 rows of the employees table
id	first_name	last_name	email	department	department_id	title	salary	hire_date	manager_id	city	status
1	William	Lewis	wlewis18@corp.io	Customer Success	7	Senior CS Manager	61774	2022-07-24	NULL	San Diego	active
2	John	Miller	jmiller51@corp.io	Legal	8	Paralegal	191694	2021-08-09	NULL	San Diego	active
3	Daniel	Rivera	drivera50@corp.io	Engineering	1	VP Engineering	135067	2016-06-06	NULL	Houston	active

The first rows of each table are shown. See how all the tables relate on the database schema page.

Expected output

Expected output of the challenge
id	first_name	last_name	email	department	department_id	title	salary	hire_date	manager_id	city	status	rnk
48	Steven	Nguyen	snguyen35@corp.io	Marketing	2	Content Lead	204449	2015-01-14	5	Phoenix	active	1
100	Nancy	Thompson	nthompson43@corp.io	Customer Success	7	Senior CS Manager	203999	2023-01-23	10	New York	active	2
111	John	Lee	jlee7@corp.io	Operations	6	Operations Analyst	203467	2015-03-19	9	Seattle	active	3
106	Donna	Johnson	djohnson40@corp.io	Engineering	1	VP Engineering	199029	2018-06-21	2	Jacksonville	active	4
26	Matthew	Wilson	mwilson27@corp.io	Marketing	2	CMO	196530	2015-10-03	3	Columbus	active	5

First 5 of 120 rows. This is the output of the model solution on the practice database. The task does not fix a sort order, so your rows may come back in a different order.

What you practise

Ranking rows with RANK() or DENSE_RANK() and handling ties

Hint and approach

Try the challenge first. Open these only when you need them.

Show the hint

RANK()

Show the step-by-step approach

How the model solution is built, in the order the database evaluates it:

Read from the employees table.
Rank the rows with RANK(), ordered by salary descending. Tied rows share a rank and the next rank is skipped.

Model solution

Checking your session…

What to watch for

There is no PARTITION BY, so the ranking spans the whole table. RANK() leaves a gap after a tie (1, 1, 3). No two salaries are equal in this dataset, so the output matches what ROW_NUMBER() or DENSE_RANK() would give.

RANK() and DENSE_RANK(). RANK() skips numbers after a tie (1, 1, 3) and DENSE_RANK() does not (1, 1, 2). Filtering on rank <= N returns more than N rows when there are ties.