How to get second largest or third largest entry from a table [duplicate]

Question

Can anyone please tell me how to find out the N th largest entry from a table in Oracle?

Like for largest we can use MAX(column_name) is there any efficient way to find nth largest also?

Answer 1

You can find the Nth largest value of a column by using the following query

SELECT * 
FROM TableName a 
WHERE n = (
           SELECT count( DISTINCT (b.ColumnName) )
           FROM TableName b 
           WHERE a.ColumnName <= b.ColumnName 
          );

Answer 2

SELECT *
FROM (
  SELECT some_column, 
         row_number() over (order by your_sort_column desc) as row_num
  FROM some_table
) t
WHERE row_num = 3

If you expect more than one row to have the same value in your_sort_column you can also use the rank() function

SELECT *
FROM (
  SELECT some_column, 
         rank() over (order by your_sort_column desc) as row_rank
  FROM some_table
) t
WHERE row_rank = 3

This migh return more than one row..

Answer 3

I think the below query will work to find the second highest record with NOT IN.

SELECT MAX( userId )
FROM table 
WHERE userId NOT IN ( 
                      SELECT MAX( userId )
                      FROM table
                    ); 

simple and useful...