I do have a follow-up question.  Do the vertex ids have to be unique across all vertices?  I am assuming they do.  So, it is not like I can have vertex ids unique for within a label 'person' but not unique across other label's such as 'software'.  That is, I cannot have a 'person' vertex with id 1 and a 'software' vertex with id 1 as well.  In other words these are not ids unique for each entity / table as you would in a relational database sense, but a cross database id that would in essence have to be unique across all tables in that database.  If that is the case, they don't serve the purpose I had intended for them.