It would be great to run the Database emulator in a console and then, for example, the functions emulator in another console. In this fashion, You could upload your test-data to the Realtime DB and test/debug your function many times without having to reload all the test-data.
I tried to run only the database in a console like this:
firebase emulators:start --only database
But when I do the same for functions, the emulator hub gets deployed on the next port, so the database and the functions won't communicate to each other, i.e. the triggers won't fire at delete/create/etc. events on the DB.
I tried to find a way to tell the emulator to use a particular running hub, but still no luck.
Any help would be much appreciated.