Restarting a program after exception

Refactor this - you'll get a stackoverflow error sooner or later if you have enough failures.

queryRepeatedly should just be query. It should return void and throw exceptions on failures.

Wrap in something that looks like this, your true queryRepeatedly function?

while True:
    try:
        query()
    except:
        #handle
    time.sleep(15)

All looping, no recursion needed.

Note that you must think carefully about how much of your program you need to restart. From your question it sounded like your actual problem was ensuring the query could try again if it sporadically fails, which is what my solution ensures. But if you want to clean up program resources - say, bounce SQL connections, which may have broken - then you need to think more carefully about how much of your program you need to "restart." In general you need to understand why your query failed to know what to fix, and in the extreme case, the right thing to do is an email or SMS to someone on call who can inspect the situation and write an appropriate patch or fix.

To restart anything, just use a while loop outside the try. For example:

def foo():
    while True:
        try:
            foo2()
        except:
            pass
        else:
            break

---

And if you want to pass the exception up the chain, just do this in the outer function instead of the inner function:

def queryRepeatedly():
    while True:
        while True:
            try:
                foo()
                bar()
                baz()
            except:
                pass
            else:
                break
        time.sleep(15)

def foo():
    foo2()

---

All that indentation is a little hard to read, but it's easy to refactor this:

def queryAttempt()
    foo()
    bar()
    baz()

def queryOnce():
    while True:
        try:
            queryAttempt()
        except:
            pass
        else:
            break

def queryRepeatedly():
    while True:
        queryOnce()
        time.sleep(15)

---

But if you think about it, you can also merge the two while loops into one. The use of continue may be a bit confusing, but see if you like it better:

def queryRepeatedly():
    while True:
        try:
            foo()
            bar()
            baz()
        except:
            continue
        time.sleep(15)