fetch fourth maximum record from the table field

Question

Following is the command to fetch maximum salary form empsalary table in mysql

select max(salary) from empsalary;

but I want to fetch employee who got fourth highest from the list of employee. I don't want to use trigger or function because I know there is direct command to fetch.

Answer 1

select * from empsalary order by salary desc limit 4

Answer 2

It's essentially as Col. Shrapnel has stated. Select the top 4 records as sorted by salary and then choose the last record. If it's important to do it all in SQL, you could do something like this:

select min(salary) from 
  (select salary from empsalary order by salary desc limit 4) tmp;