As you may already know, Microsoft is working on the next version of SQL, codename SQL Denali – officially called SQL 2012.
To start learning (and enjoying) SQL Denali, Microsoft is offering a free ebook (still in writing progress)
http://go.microsoft.com/FWLink/?Linkid=229829
Microsoft SQL Server Denali delivers significant enhancements to well-known, critical capabilities like high availability and disaster recovery. These enhancements promise to assist organizations in achieving the highest mission-critical confidence to date.
Server Core support along with breakthrough features like AlwaysOn Availability Groups, active secondaries, and key improvements to features such as failover clustering now offer organizations a range of accommodating options to achieve maximum application availability and data protection for SQL Server instances and databases within a datacenter and across datacenters.