How to sort a list in a dropdown select?

Question

HTML

There is a database table with cities in alphabetical order.
In the drop-down menu of the select type, you need to load a list of cities from the database, but display certain 5-6 cities (the largest in terms of population) first, and the rest of the cities in alphabetical order. For example:

Киев
Днепропетровск
Харьков 
Авдеевка 
Артёмовск 
Волноваха 
Горловка 
Дебальцево 
....

Is it necessary to add a "weight" or "rank" column to the table for such sorting?
Poke, please, with your nose into the decision of a novice programmer.
Written in Ruby on Rails

Answer 1

Well, at least you should have a `population` field for each city, and sort by it. Or you can add ranks. Ruby itself or the DB have no idea which cities are the largest in terms of population