Top N Query

I remember back in the days of Oracle V6, I was asked a question in an interview to write a query in Sql - not using Pl/Sql - to show the top 5 Salaries from the EMP table. Ever since then I have been interested in queries that answer this.

Using the analytic function dense_rank as pointed out by Tom Kyte in this month's Oracle magazine, is the best I have seen so far.

select *
from (
select deptno,ename,sal,dense_rank() over (partition by deptno order by sal desc) Salrnk
from emp)
where SalRnk <=3
order by deptno,sal desc