After reading my earlier post T-SQL Query to Find the Second Highest Column Value in a Table a lot of users asked me to also help them with writing a query to find the second lowest column value in a table. So here it is: If we had a table named Employee which had a column named Salary and we had to find the second lowest Salary in the Employee table, the query for the same would be:

SELECT TOP 1 Salary FROM (SELECT TOP 2 Salary FROM Employee ORDER BY Salary ASC) AS E ORDER BY Salary DESC

If we ran the above query against the Employee table which had the following 5 rows:

5000
4000
3000
2000
1000

The subquery or the inner query would return the top 2 rows in ascending Salary order which would be:

1000
2000

The outer query would then select the top 1 row from the subquery results in descending Salary order which would be:

2000

Note that if we had to get the fourth lowest Salary, we could do so by simply changing the subquery from TOP 2 to TOP 4

Cheers,
Raj

~~~ CODING FOR ETERNITY !!! ~~~