LIMIT & OFFSET SQL practice problemEasyVerified answer

Bottom N — Lowest Values with ORDER BY ASC + LIMIT

List the 3 LOWEST-paid employees with a deterministic tie-breaker. Show first_name, last_name, salary, employee_id.

  • CTEs
  • Sorting
  • Top-N

Interview brief

Understand the request

List the 3 LOWEST-paid employees with a deterministic tie-breaker. Show first_name, last_name, salary, employee_id.

Data you will use

Review the relevant tables before deciding how to join, filter, or aggregate them.

employees

  • first_nameTEXT
  • last_nameTEXT
  • salaryDECIMAL
  • employee_idINTEGER

Hints, when you need them

Open one clue at a time so you still do the reasoning.

Hint 1

For Bottom-N use ASC (default) instead of DESC. The structure is otherwise identical to Top-N.

Hint 2

Don't try to compute Bottom-N by sorting DESC and reversing — sorting ASC + LIMIT is simpler and lets the engine optimise (it can stop reading after N rows in some cases).

Hint 3

ORDER BY salary, employee_id LIMIT 3

Verified SQL answer

Attempt the problem first, then compare structure and reasoning—not just syntax.

Reveal solution and explanation
SELECT first_name, last_name, salary, employee_id FROM employees ORDER BY salary, employee_id LIMIT 3;

Why this works

Bottom-N gets the same engine optimisations as Top-N (the planner can use a 'top-N sort' that keeps only N rows in memory). Reversing a DESC sort wastes memory and CPU.

Expected result

Use this output to verify values, aliases, ordering, and row count.

first_namelast_namesalaryemployee_id
EmmaThomas5200010
JaneSmith550002
NicoleRodriguez5600014

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