# State of the World

The AMPS State of the World (SOW) allows you to automatically keep and query the latest information about a topic on the AMPS server, without building a separate database. Using SOW lets you build impressively high-performance applications that provide rich experiences to users. The AMPS C++ client lets you query SOW topics and subscribe to changes with ease. AMPS SOW topics can be used as a current value cache to provide the most recently published value for each record, as a key/value object store, as the source for an aggregate or conflated topic, or all of the above uses. For more information on State of the World topics, see the [_AMPS User Guide_](https://crankuptheamps.gitbook.io/amps-guides/3CTUnbDPEyxsZkMSEaJd/amps-user-guide)
