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Department Leaderboard (Multi-Key Sort)
HR is printing a departmental leaderboard: employees grouped by department, and within each department the highest-paid person on top.
Show name, department, salary. Sort by department ascending, then salary descending.
Multi-key ORDER BY is the SQL equivalent of "group by department then rank inside the group" — the most underrated 2-second productivity gain in reporting queries. Each key sorts independently, and ASC/DESC apply per-key.
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Schema
employees
| emp_id | name | department | position | salary | hire_date | manager_id | performance_rating |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Alice Johnson | Engineering | Senior Developer | 95000 | 2019-03-15 | 5 | 4.5 |
| 2 | Bob Smith | Engineering | Developer | 75000 | 2020-06-01 | 1 | 3.8 |
| 3 | Carol Williams | Marketing | Marketing Manager | 85000 | 2018-09-20 | NULL | 4.2 |
Expected output: Eng-Alice, Eng-Bob, Mktg-Carol, Mktg-Dan
Hint
Concepts
SELECT ORDER BY
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