About the free trial I cannot say much. I have not seen one, and we are using MSDN.
About better source control systems I have more to say. Personally I think that almost anything is better than SourceSafe, but that is a personal opinion. Do research it, and see what problems people had with it. An alternative is Team Foundation Server (also from Microsoft). This has a different licensing model. SourceSafe is individually licensed, TFS is per server and client access. TFS is newer. Other alternatives include SourceGear Vault (we use this), Subversion, ... I'm still looking for the perfect version control system.
Concerning using source control with your databases, I'm curious how you are planning to implement it. There are only a few commercial solutions I'm aware of (Red Gate's SQL Compare 6 Professional (I work for Red Gate, and I was the architect of this tool), DBGhost, and Microsoft's VSTS for DB professionals)
You may also want to have a look at: http://www.simple-talk.com/sql/database-administration/source-control-and-databases/
Regards,
Andras
Andras Belokosztolszki, MCPD, PhD
GoldenGate Software