How to get the top N rows in SQL — ORDER BY ... LIMIT

You want a leaderboard: just the three highest salaries in the table.

Every example runs against the cheatsheet's sample tables — departments(id, name), employees(id, name, dept_id, salary, manager_id, hired_on) and orders(id, emp_id, amount, ordered_on) — and was executed and verified against SQLite, so you can paste it in and get the same result.

SELECT name, salary FROM employees ORDER BY salary DESC LIMIT 3;
-- Top 3 salaries: Alice / Bob / Carol
-- LIMIT works in MySQL / PostgreSQL / SQLite; SQL Server uses TOP 3, the SQL:2008 spelling FETCH FIRST 3 ROWS ONLY works in Oracle and PostgreSQL 10+

SQL Cheatsheet one-page card — queries that actually work — The full one-page card — SQL Cheatsheet. Get the complete cheatsheet on GitHub