SQL query to find second highest salary?

Consider below simple table:

Name     Salary
---------------
abc     100000
bcd     1000000
efg     40000
ghi     500000

How to find the employee whose salary is second highest. For example, in above table, “ghi” has the second highest salary as 500000.

Below is simple query to find the employee whose salary is highest.

SELECT name, MAX(salary) as salary FROM employee 

We can nest the above query to find the second largest salary.

SELECT name, MAX(salary) AS salary
  FROM employee
 WHERE salary < (SELECT MAX(salary)
                 FROM employee); 

There are other ways also as suggested by RajnishKrJha.

SELECT name, MAX(salary) AS salary 
FROM employee 
WHERE salary IN
(SELECT salary FROM employee MINUS SELECT MAX(salary) 
FROM employee); 

SELECT name, MAX(salary) AS salary 
FROM employee 
WHERE salary  (SELECT MAX(salary) 
FROM employee);

One way as suggested by Arka Poddar.
IN SQL Server using Common Table Expression or CTE, we can find the second highest salary:

WITH T AS
(
SELECT *
   DENSE_RANK() OVER (ORDER BY Salary Desc) AS Rnk
FROM Employees
)
SELECT Name
FROM T
WHERE Rnk=2;

How to find the third largest salary?
Simple, we can do one more nesting.

SELECT name, MAX(salary) AS salary
  FROM employee
 WHERE salary < (SELECT MAX(salary) 
                 FROM employee
                 WHERE salary < (SELECT MAX(salary)
                 FROM employee)
                ); 

Note that instead of nesting for second, third largest salary, we can find nth salary using general query like in mysql:

select salary from employee order by salary desc limit n-1,1;
Or
Select name,salary from employee A where n-1 = (Select count(1) from employee B where B.salary>A.salary)