title: Oracle TOP N ordered rows
body: <p>I would like to get the top N rows from an Oracle table sorted by date.</p>
  
  <p>The common way to do this, and this solution returns for every question I could find on SO/google.</p>
  
  <pre><code>Select *
  from
  (select * from
  myTable 
  ordered by Date desc)
  where rownum &lt; N
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>This solution is in my case impracticable because myTable contains an huge ammount of rows which would
  lead to Oracle taking too long to return all rows in the subquery.</p>
  
  <p>Question is, is there a way to limit the number of ORDERED rows returned in the subquery ?</p>