How to write "Order By" clause before "Where" clause

Question

I want to write an ORDER BY clause before my WHERE condition because I need to truncate my results to just 10, but I need to sort them in alphabetical order first.

I know that you can't put ORDER BY before WHERE so how can I do it?

I need to do something like the following:

SELECT *
FROM myTable
ORDER BY TOP10
WHERE ROWNUM <=10

Answer 1

You can use an inline view for this

SELECT * 
FROM (
 SELECT *
 FROM myTable
 ORDER BY TOP10) T
WHERE ROWNUM <=10

Answer 2

SELECT * 
FROM (SELECT * FROM myTable RANK() OVER (ORDER BY TOP10) rank) 
WHERE rank <= 10;

For more see this

Edited: Thanks Wolf for correction:

select * from (select mt.*, rank() over (order by top10) rank from mytable mt) 
WHERE rank <= 10