Legacy systems are information systems that have been developed by means of methods, tools and database management systems that have become obsolete, but they are still being used due to their reliability. As time goes on, the maintenance of this software becomes more complex, expensive and painful. The MOMENT framework supports automatic formal model transformations in MDA. This model transformation approach is based on the algebraic specification of models and benefits from mature term rewriting system technology to perform model transformation using rewriting logic. In this paper, we present how we apply this formal transformation mechanism to recover a legacy relational database, obtaining a UML-based application.