Sybase has a feature to turn off replication at the session level: set replication = off, which can be temporarily turned off when there is a maintenance action on the table. Our users also want this feature. I add a new flag bit in xinfo, control it with a session-level variable, when set to true, this flag is written when the transaction is committed, and when the logic is decoded it abandons the transaction like aborted transactions. Since PostgreSQL has two types of replication, I call the variable "logical_replication" to avoid confusion and default value is true.
There's something related to this already. You can set the replication origin for the transaction to the special value DoNotReplicateId (replication origin id 65535). This will suppress replication of the transaction, at least for output plugins that're aware of replication origins.
This isn't presently exposed to SQL, it's there for the use of logical replication extensions. It's possible to expose it with a pretty trivial C function in an extension.
I think it's a bit of a hack TBH, it's something I perpetrated sometime in the 9.4 series when we needed a way to suppress replication of individual transactions. It originated out of core, so the original design was constrained in how it worked, and maybe it would've actually made more sense to use an xlinfo flag. Probably not worth changing now though.
Be extremely careful though. If you're hiding things from logical replication you can get all sorts of confusing and exciting results. I very strongly suggest you make anything like this superuser-only.
