The DB_MAX_RETRIES implies that a query will be
retried that many times. 'retry' means it happened
once before. In the current code, if DB_MAX_RETRIES
is set to 1, the query won't be retried at all.
If it's set to 0, the query won't even be run.
This constant should actually be called DB_MAX_ATTEMPTS
to indicate that the variable includes the first try.