I am thinking about choosing rails' ActiveRecord to have access to a legacy database. It's names are really confusing, so it wouldn't be a good idea to use its column names in the model.

Setting table name is really easy. But do I have a way to rename column name, only in the model?

Convention over configuration is great, but in this case I can't change legacy database names.

Using alias\_attribute from ActiveSupport doesn't solve my problem, since the object still shows the legacy column names when being serialized or printed. I need to return these models in JSON format, for instance, and alias\_attribute wouldn't be suitable for this.