Finding the smallest salary difference
Question
You're given the following table showing employees at a company and their respective salaries:
Table: employee_salaries
| employee_ID | salary |
|---|---|
| 1 | 80000 |
| 2 | 70000 |
| 3 | 67000 |
| 4 | 85000 |
| 5 | 95000 |
| 6 | 63000 |
| 7 | 58000 |
| 8 | 40000 |
| 9 | 55000 |
Given the above table, write a SQL query to return the employees with the closest absolute difference in salaries. If there is a tie (e.g. multiple employees have the same salary difference), then show the record with the lower sum of salaries.
You can view/query this table in an interactive SQL fiddle here.