Find max and second max salary for a employee table MySQL

You can just run 2 queries as inner queries to return 2 columns:

select
  (SELECT MAX(Salary) FROM Employee) maxsalary,
  (SELECT MAX(Salary) FROM Employee
  WHERE Salary NOT IN (SELECT MAX(Salary) FROM Employee )) as [2nd_max_salary]

SQL Fiddle Demo

Try like this

SELECT (select max(Salary) from Employee) as MAXinmum),(max(salary) FROM Employee WHERE salary NOT IN (SELECT max(salary)) FROM Employee);

(Or)

Try this, n would be the nth item you would want to return

 SELECT DISTINCT(Salary) FROM table ORDER BY Salary DESC LIMIT n,1

In your case

 SELECT DISTINCT(column_name) FROM table_name ORDER BY column_name DESC limit 2,1;