Question

http://searchsqlserver.techtarget.com/tip/Differences-between-varchar-and-nvarchar-in-SQL-Server:

The size for a table page is 8,196 bytes, and no one row in a table
can be more than 8,060 characters. This in turn limits the maximum
size of a VARCHAR to 8,000 bytes.

What exactly is a “table page”?

is a “table page” something like an imaginary row or something?

Answer 1

See this link for an explanation: Understanding Pages and Extents
Quote:

The fundamental unit of data storage in SQL Server is the page. The
disk space allocated to a data file (.mdf or .ndf) in a database is
logically divided into pages numbered contiguously from 0 to n. Disk
I/O operations are performed at the page level. That is, SQL Server
reads or writes whole data pages.

Here’s another one: SQL Server data structures
Quote:

In SQL Server, data is organized in pages. A page has a fixed size (8
KB). Each page contains records. The number of records that can be
stored in a page depends on the size of the records. The operation of
reading data from a page is called a logical IO. The smaller the size
of a record is, the more records can be read with the same number of
logical IOs.