ok I think I might know the reason. my impala version is 2.12, and according to documentation "Prior to CDH 5.7 / Impala 2.5, you could use a partitioned table as the source and copy data from it, but could not specify any partitioning clauses for the new table.". So it appears that my impala is too old to support creating partitioned table while only support reading an existing partitioned table...
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