How to find nth highest salary from Employee table in SQL Server?

SELECT TOP 1 salary FROM (SELECT DISTINCT TOP n salary FROM employee ORDER BY salary DESC) a ORDER BY salary

What is a Subquery ?

A Subquery is a normal T-SQL query that is nested inside another query. They are created using parentheses when you have a SELECT statement that serve as the basis for the either part of the data or the condition in another query.
Subqueries are generally used to fill one of couple of needs -

1. Break a query up into a series of a logical steps.
2. Provide a listing to be the target of a WHERE clause together with [IN|ESISTS|ANY|ALL].
3. TO provide a lookup driven by each individual record in a parent query.
Eg.
SELECT SelectList FROM SomeTable WHERE SomeColumn = (SELECT SingleColumn FROM SomeTable WHERE Condition that results in only one row returned)

What is the DEADLOCK ?

A deadlock is a situation in which two transactions conflict with each other and the only resolution is to cancel one transaction.

How to find out column names and their datatypes in a given table using a query in SQL Server?

Using the table tablename, write the query as follows -
Select * from information_schema.columns where table_name = tablename