Legacy column names

I’m currently working with ms sql server against a pretty old database.
Some
of the column names work fine, but others have spaces in the name or
other
characters. (part #, warranty exp. date)

I can’t access those methods for obvious reasons. Does anyone know how I
would go about making those available to the validations and form
helpers?

Perhaps I have to change the mappings of the attributes hash to the
database… but I have no clue where to start. Help would be appreciated
and
I’ll make a patch or plugin out of this.