Selecting the second row of a table using rownum

To explain this behaviour, we need to understand how Oracle processes
ROWNUM. When assigning ROWNUM to a row, Oracle starts at 1 and
only increments the value when a row is selected; that is, when all
conditions in the WHERE clause are met. Since our condition requires
that ROWNUM is greater than 2, no rows are selected and ROWNUM is
never incremented beyond 1.

The bottom line is that conditions such as the following will work as
expected.

.. WHERE rownum = 1;

.. WHERE rownum <= 10;

While queries with these conditions will always return zero rows.

.. WHERE rownum = 2;

.. WHERE rownum > 10;

Quoted from Understanding Oracle rownum

You should modify you query in this way in order to work:

select empno
from
    (
    select empno, rownum as rn 
    from (
          select empno
          from emp
          order by sal desc
          )
    )
where rn=2;

EDIT: I’ve corrected the query to get the rownum after the order by sal desc